The Characteristics of Entrepreneurial Knowledge (II)

Entrepreneurial knowledge is exclusive and dispersed. What do I mean by this? When I say it is exclusive, I mean that each human being, each one of us, every man, every woman, possesses, as it were, a few “atoms” or “bits” of the information used in society, that is, a tiny amount of all the subjective, practical information people continually generate, discover, handle, and use in society. But that small part—I say “atoms” or “bits” to use a metaphor from the natural sciences, and such metaphors are always dangerous—that small part available to each person is private; it is exclusive to that particular person. To put it another way, what you know, what you have here in your mind, and what you have in yours, and what this young woman has in hers, is exclusive or private. Why is this so? Each person starts out with a set of specific circumstances that are historically unrepeatable. They will never exist in exactly the same form in the life of any other human being. They do not exist now in any other human being’s life, in any part of the world, nor have they ever existed in precisely the same form in the past, nor will they ever exist in precisely the same form in the future. In other words, our entrepreneurial view of the world, in terms of where we live and the circumstances that surround us, not only our genetic inheritance, but also our influences, the experiences we have had, the ways we have shaped them into memories, and the ways we can recombine them in the mixer, blender, or cocktail shaker of our mind, to creatively imagine the future, in the form of entrepreneurial expectations, is a view that no one else will ever fully share, because the knowledge we each start out with is exclusive; it is private. This should make us feel both proud and a little dizzy. What I am saying is that no matter how similar we may think other people are to us, they can never be identical to us, at least not from the perspective of entrepreneurship, because they each start out with experiences, knowledge, and circumstances that can never be an exact duplicate of ours. To put it another way, we are unique in the universe. We are unique as to our view of our surroundings and as to our capacity for creativity and entrepreneurship.