A friend of mine has been trying to publish an article on social entrepreneurship in an academic journal. She is presenting a theory without a lot of supporting data. Social entrepreneurship is a relatively new field, much in need of theorizing and definition. Given the infancy of social entrepreneurship, I find this bias for supporting data in the academic journals not constructive. My reasoning is as follows:
- For much of history intellectual thought was pure theory; not until the advent of modern mathematics did the concept of data analysis really emerge.
- Some of the greatest intellectual breakthroughs began with a theory and then data was discovered to support them. Two examples would be Galileo's Law of Falling Bodies and Einstein's Theory of Relativity. As George Polya said in Mathematical Methods in Science, "Galileo found his law not by experimenting but by simple, plain thinking, by scholastic reasoning".
- Thinking can be severely limited by starting with data. The famous parable of Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington makes this point clear. He said, "Some men went fishing in the sea with a net, and upon examining what they caught they concluded that there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea."
I am a co-author of the article on social entrepreneurship but I am not disgruntled. I am concerned by what I consider the illogical preference in favor of data. The implications of this preference are far reaching and could adversely affect the development of intellectual thought and the formulation of new theories.
To bring this post back to entrepreneurship, remember the famous quote from Henry Ford, "If I had listened to the customers, I would have raised faster horses". All of this post may appear inconsistent with about 100 posts here on SF about analysis, but remember all the quotes come from certified geniuses. If you are not a genius start with the data--except in academic journal articles.
This post draws heavily for quotes from an article in 1980 by R.W. Hamming entitled "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics". If you are interested in mathematics, science or intellectual thought, this article is a seminal piece of thought.
