Science and Swagger for Success: The Interactions of Hypothesis Testing and Self-Efficacy to Influence Business Model Performance

Extant literature on entrepreneurial cognition declares that entrepreneurs who are confident in their ability to design a new business perform better than entrepreneurs who lack such a self-perception of efficacy. This is swagger. A different set of literature, including Discovery-Driven Planning, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup Method, recommends that entrepreneurs create, confirm, or reject hypotheses to design and refine the specific elements of their business model. This is the scientific method. This article used survey data from 353 participants in an international business pitch competition to connect these two literatures. We found that the number of hypotheses that the entrepreneur elucidated and confirmed were linked to business model performance. Counter-intuitively, the number of hypotheses rejected by the entrepreneur showed the strongest relationship to success. We found no significant relationship between the number of interviews that an entrepreneur conducted and the business model’s performance: more effort was not always helpful. Although we found no direct connection between an entrepreneur’s self-efficacy in searching for a new idea and the business model’s eventual success, entrepreneurs with high levels of this narrow form of self-­confidence were more likely to perform the constructive actions of elucidating, confirming, and rejecting hypotheses. In summary, swagger leads to science, and science leads to success.