When do Entrepreneurs Benefit from Acting Like Scientists? A Field Experiment in the UK

This paper investigates the role of a firm’s degree of business development—defined as the extent to which the firm has already developed into a continuous and sustainable market participant—in moderating the benefits of a scientific approach to decision-making, which combines cognition and action-based components. We conducted a field experiment with 261 UK entrepreneurs with different degrees of business development. Our results show that all treated firms experience a positive effect on firm size, but not all on firm revenue. The treatment is associated with a positive effect on firm revenue for firms with a more advanced degree of business development, but a negative effect for firms with a lower degree of business development. We elaborate on the implications of these results for future re-search