About

I teach entrepreneurship at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, where I also direct the Crocker Innovation Fellows program — an interdisciplinary studio in which students learn innovation by doing it. My PhD is in economics, from the University of California, Berkeley.

My research asks how innovation works as a learning process: how entrepreneurs find needs no one has named yet, how they resolve uncertainty well enough to act, and how they compete once they do. Over the years that has run through learning curves, the social value of innovation, cognition in innovation, and trust as something built through repeated interaction.

Why I write for entrepreneurs

Popular advice tells founders to fail fast — to treat failure as the way you learn. I think that mistakes the problem. The challenge is not failure; it is uncertainty, and the belief that nothing can be done about it. A great deal can be done, cheaply, before anyone commits real money to a guess.

So I write for entrepreneurs rather than investors, and I try to write the way I would talk with you across a table: plainly, without jargon, and without pretending the answers are more certain than they are. The economics is underneath, holding everything up, and you should never have to look at it.

The books are free to read online. They are used in my classes and revised constantly, so you are reading a living draft.

Elsewhere

• Expeditionary Innovation — finding a need worth solving
• Make the Call — deciding under uncertainty
• Is This Worth Doing? — profit before revenue exists

Reach me at nile@byu.edu.