Entrepreneurial Learning and Strategic Foresight

We study how learning by expe-rience across projects affects an entrepreneur’s strategicforesight. In a quantitative study of 314 entrepreneursacross 722 crowdfunded projects supplemented with aprogram of qualitative interviews, we counterintuitivelyfind that entrepreneurs make less accurate predictions asthey gain experience executing projects: they miss theirpredicted timeline to bring a product to market by nearlysix additional weeks on each successive project. Althoughlearning should improve prediction accuracy in principle,we argue that entrepreneurs also learn of opportunities toaugment each successive product, which drasticallyexpands the interdependencies beyond what an entrepre-neur can anticipate. We find that entrepreneurs encountermore unforeseen interdependencies in their subsequentprojects, and they sacrifice on-time delivery to addressthese interdependencies.