EIRC Seminar – Philippe Silberzahn on “Non-predictive control and the creation of artifacts in effectuation: The role of near decomposability”

EIRC Seminar – Philippe Silberzahn on “Non-predictive control and the creation of artifacts in effectuation: The role of near decomposability”

Date: Tuesday, June 6^th, 2023

Time: 12:00 to 13:30

Paper by: Philippe Silberzahn (emlyon business school) and Dominique Vian (Skema business school)

Discussant: Pia Arenius (emlyon business school)

On June 6^th, 2023, we were delighted to have Philippe Silberzahn presenting his working paper titled ““Non-predictive control and the creation of artifacts in effectuation: The role of near decomposability” (co-authored with Dominique Vian).

The audience engaged well with the paper, both on site and online, and provided constructive feedback to both Philippe and Dominique. A special thanks to Pia Arenius, who did an excellent job as discussant despite the challenging complexity of the paper itself.

We wish both Philippe and Dominique the best of luck in improving the paper for journal submission!

Non-predictive control and the creation of artifacts in effectuation: The role of near decomposability Philippe Silberzahn (emlyon business school) and Dominique Vian (Skema business school)

Abstract

Despite more than twenty years of research, important theoretical questions remain unanswered in effectuation. One of them relates to non-predictive control, a central issue in the theory. Effectuation proposes that entrepreneurs create artifacts such as products, firms, and markets that they do not predict at the outset, yet that they eventually want, through a process consisting in a series of unpredicted means-ends associations. Yet, effectuation does not provide a theoretical link between these associations explaining how entrepreneurs control this process to avoid a random walk. In this conceptual paper, we propose that this link is provided by near-decomposability, a property of complex systems. We contribute by showing how near-decomposability is used in each of the principles and developing an improved model of the process, thus filling an important gap in effectuation theory.