Do we understand each other?
Research Paper Title:
“Do we understand each other? Toward a simulated empathy theory for entrepreneurship”
Authors:
Mark Packard (University of Nevada)
Thomas Burnham (University of Nevada)
Background:
Theorists have long struggled to describe what some call the ‘fuzzy front-end’. Researchers know little about how and why entrepreneurship originates. Classic works in economics have described this simply and abstractly as ‘innovation’ or ‘alertness’, leaving to future work the unpacking of what occurs in entrepreneurs' minds that inspires both the recognition of a possible opportunity and a willingness to take on the challenge. Recent efforts have investigated entrepreneurs' learning processes, their perceptions and cognitive processes, and their creativity and imagination as important factors in ‘seeing’ and evaluating opportunities. Yet, while these initial efforts offer key cognitive mechanics of idea processing, we still lack a general process theory of opportunity origination. Some have asserted the primary role of empathy within the entrepreneurial process as a key determinant of a venture's success. While it is clear that entrepreneurship is primarily a process of solving other's problems, the role of empathy in sensing and interpreting such problems has not been deeply elaborated.
Methodology:
Analytical Approach: Theory paper
Propositions:
Stronger forms of vicarious imagination will expectedly facilitate the recognition of more valuable entrepreneurial opportunities.
Opportunity evaluations using stronger forms of vicarious imagination will expectedly facilitate more accurate evaluations of a perceived opportunity’s potential than weaker forms of vicarious imagination.
Entrepreneurial empathic accuracy is positively related to the similarity of firsthand experiences (PK) between entrepreneur and consumers.
a) Entrepreneurial empathic accuracy is positively related to the accuracy of the entrepreneur’s factual knowledge (FK) about the consumer. b) Entrepreneurial empathic accuracy is positively related to the accuracy of the entrepreneur’s factual knowledge (FK) about the consumer’s experience.
Empathic accuracy relates positively to the strength of the type of vicarious imagination employed by the entrepreneur.
a) The positive relationship between empathic accuracy and entrepreneurial performance is positively mediated by the entrepreneur’s inferential accuracy of causal FK regarding the needs experience. b) The positive relationship between empathic accuracy and entrepreneurial performance is positively mediated by the alignment of the entrepreneur’s and customer’s causal FK regarding the needs experience.
Results:
The role of empathy in the entrepreneurial process is vital and, from our broader view of empathy, inescapable. The necessary role of phenomenal knowledge (PK) in determining what is, or could be, wanted in the market—that is, in identifying an entrepreneurial opportunity—implies that vicarious (empathic) imaginations are at the very heart of the entrepreneurial process, as consumer needs PK, from which opportunities are recognized, can only be derived through such imagination.
This places vicarious imagination at the foundation of entrepreneurship theory and the origin of entrepreneurial processes.
Consumers determine entrepreneurial performance; entrepreneurs succeed only to the extent that they have surmised correctly the fancies of consumers. This, of course, is where simulated empathy theory provides a critical foundation, for consumers are poor predictors of their future wants and even worse at explaining their latent needs.
Simulated empathy theory offers, then, a clear and general solution to the puzzle of entrepreneurial performance.
Conclusion:
Entrepreneurship theory cannot view empathy as the mere mimicking of another's feelings, as mimicry provides limited insights. Instead, empathy must be viewed as imaginatively experiencing another's experience from the point of view of the other. True empathic experience engages a vicarious experiential learning process that can produce unique insights and lead to new venture ideas. Thus, vicarious imagination, and in particular empathy proper, lie at the very heart of the entrepreneurial process.
