Cooking as entrepreneurship
To honor Julia Child on her 100th birthday,聽聽writes a nice post combining three of my favorite things: cooking, entrepreneurship theory, and Austrian economics. Good cooking is about the combination of heterogeneous resources, it requires experimentation and creativity, and it either works or it doesn鈥檛. Most important:
A system that will yield the most valuable and pleasing combinations of entrepreneurial economic or cooking activities will have low entry barriers (anyone can try to cook!) and a robust feedback-based system of error correction. Low entry barriers facilitate creativity in discovering new useful products from the raw elements, as well as enabling new value creation when some of those raw elements change. Error correction, whether a 鈥測uck, that鈥檚 gross!鈥� at home or a lack of profits due to low repeat business at a restaurant, is most effective and valuable when there are feedback loops that can inform the cook-producer about the value that the consumer did or did not get from the dish.
This emphasis on error correction highlights one of my聽differences with Kirzner鈥檚 approach to entrepreneurship. In Kirzner鈥檚 system, which emphasizes entrepreneurship as a coordinating agency, the entrepreneur is modeled as 鈥減iercing the fog鈥� of uncertainty 鈥� hence the familiar metaphor of entrepreneurship as the discovery of preexisting profit opportunities. My approach focuses on action, not discovery, and gives a larger role to uncertainty. What generates coordination, in this approach, is the entrepreneurial selection process, not the 鈥渃orrectness鈥� of entrepreneurial decisions.
Incidentally, Saras Sarasvathy often uses cooking to illustrate her 鈥渆ffectual鈥� approach to entrepreneurial decision-making (i.e., cooks don鈥檛 always follow a recipe to produce a known dish, but use the ingredients they have in a sequential, experimental process). And for more on food, see聽听补苍诲听.
