The thrill of discovery and enjoyment of surprises drives change and adds spice, still, a lot of work goes into making life more predictable: Explorers spend months planning adventures, and most surprise parties aren’t spontaneous. Yet how we overcome doubts and disagreements about what could happen is murky.

Amar Bhidé talks about how we act when we cannot rely on mechanical calculation or impulse. His new book, Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Unknown, explains how entrepreneurs justify their judgments by combining imagination and evidence. This process sustains a diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem, consisting of new, emerging, and mature companies that all contribute to economic dynamism and human flourishing.

He discusses how people confidently make and justify their fallible judgements and, furthermore, how this process creates a symbiotic relationship between startups and giant corporations.

Bhidé is a Columbia University professor of health policy and focuses on teaching, developing, and disseminating case histories of transformational technological advances. He’s the author of five books and has written for the Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other publications.

He last spoke at the Library in 2009 about his book, The Venturesome Economy: How Innovation Sustains Prosperity in a More Connected World.