Foi uma excelente surpresa. Uma abordagem sobre a estratégia com algumas novidades e sob um prisma completamente diferente do habitual. Algumas das ideias alinham-se com algumas das nossa reflexões (como em "Para assentar ideias").
"In this paper we focus instead on economic actors’ capacity to theorize, just like scientists, and argue that the theories actors generate animate markets and reveal paths to value creation.
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To address the limitations of an omniscient and efficient view of markets, strategy scholars have postulated several alternative value-generating paths to heterogeneity. Two seem particularly salient for our purposes. First, heterogeneity may reflect a firm’s initial resource endowment that results from luck or the firm’s unique history. These initial endowments provide a source of difference and latent possibility and a vehicle for building capabilities over time. Second, heterogeneity may result from cognitive limitations and behavioral failures. The fact that the rationality of some market actors “falls short of omniscience” creates heterogeneity and opportunities. Economic actors neither act rationally nor omnisciently when purchasing assets and making economic decisions — because of cognitive bounds and the limits of human information processing — which in turn leads to heterogeneity. In short, the suboptimal decisions of some economic actors open up the possibility for creating and finding value.
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While the two above sources of heterogeneity provide useful explanations, we suggest an alternative path, one that emphasizes the human capacity to ask novel questions, frame novel problems, and compose novel theories.
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Whether in the realm of scientific discovery or economic value creation, theories guide perception and observation—they shape what we see. As simply put by Einstein, “whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use”. In other words, without questions and theories, things in our environment—even obvious ones— often remain hidden and outside our awareness. Our physical reality and environment has a large if not infinite variety of features, characteristics, and possibilities that remain latent or dormant. However, theories provide a mechanism that allows for salience and unique observation. Novel theories, sparked by novel questions and novel problem frames, allowus to see, look for, and express that which may previously have escaped awareness. And importantly, the reinterpretation of even mundane objects, events, occurrences, or readily visible factors may take on completely new meaning and insight in light of the novel theories we possess.
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Economic theories of value, as held by entrepreneurs and managers, are no different in shaping what is observed. These theories, as animated by questions and problems, provide the underlying instruments and vehicles for identifying previously unseen sources of value. [Moi ici: Recordo aqui o caso do burel e outros] They reveal new possible uses and functions— called “affordances”—for common objects and new combinations. While traditional approaches to markets focus on prices and the informational content that price might provide, economic actors with theories and opinions—as we will discuss and illustrate—can identify sources of value in unpriced factors or identify unpriced value by identifying new uses and affordances for assets.
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Perception scholars have persuasively shown that there is no way to exhaustively capture or represent a visual scene or environment. Any visual scene has a massive number of features and characteristics that could be attended to, and thus we necessarily attend to the world in more directed and focused fashion. Organisms—humans included—attend to their surroundings not in a computational or camera-like sense but rather through the questions, problems, hypotheses, and theories that they have in mind and impose on the world. Thus salience and observation, in terms of what we are aware of, are driven by theories and questions and not by the inherent characteristics (called “natural assessments” in the literature), presence or even nature of objects. This intuition, intriguingly, was featured in some of Simon’s early work, when he argued that “a subject perceives what he is ‘ready’ to perceive in it; the more complex and ambiguous the stimulus, the more the perception is determined by what is already ‘in’ the subject and less by what is in the stimulus”.
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Essential to our theory-based view, then, is the recognition that we attend to our surroundings and environment looking for something, rather than neutrally recording or scanning its contents. This “looking for” is different from comparison or calculation. Here salience and awareness are driven by the questions that we impose on the world, and the search for specific answers.
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Perception and observation are never neutral, or some kind of pure, mind- or organism-independent recording or capturing of what is objectively there, but rather “observation comes after expectation and hypothesis”. ... Thus, the mapping is from mind-to-world rather than world-to-mind.
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In sum, we argue that perception and observation do not happen based on the actual nature or characteristics of stimuli or objects themselves but rather it happens on the basis of the questions and theories that economic actors impose on situations and environments. This leaves the world poised for constant reinterpretation and possibility, as perception is not passive or automatic, but generative, though requiring a theory and “readiness to perceive”....Thus, we see theories within the context of economics and strategy as serving the same function as they do in human and scientific contexts as well. They are the human “Suchbild”—search or seek images— that direct our attention and awareness. Theories represent instruments for making previously unobserved facets in and of the environment more salient. And theories of economic value guide our awareness toward specific observations and factors that may readily have been missed by others and reveal potentially valuable assets and opportunities others overlook."