Entrepreneurship: A New Frontier in a Computational Science of Creativity

We present entrepreneurship as a new frontier for developing a computational science of creativity. Entrepreneurship often requires a large upfront investment, but customer feedback typically is delayed, and while the costs of failure can be
considerable, the gains from success too can be significant. Given its importance, how can we help novice entrepreneurs learn about entrepreneurship? We analyze the role human coaches play in mentoring novice entrepreneurs by asking critical questions to help generate business models. We propose that virtual coaches may augment the learning of novice entrepreneurs. We describe a preliminary experiment in designing a virtual coach named Errol for learning about entrepreneurship. When a startup team creates an initial business model, Errol uses semantic and lexical analyses to
ask questions about the model, leading to model revision. Our experiment indicates that creativity may emerge out of the interactions between the virtual coach and a startup team, and that this human–computer co–creativity may accelerate the
process by which a novice entrepreneurs can learn to create intermediate–level business models