New Book is Published!
The Behavioral Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation: A Guide to the Behavioral Venture Process™️
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Your Book Is Here: The Behavioral Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation
A Guide to The Behavioral Venture Process™
After thirty years of teaching entrepreneurship across four schools at Columbia University — and building on doctoral research at Stevens Institute of Technology — I have written the book that the framework has always needed.
The Behavioral Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is built on a single observation, confirmed across thousands of student ventures: the gap between what customers say they will do and what they actually do is not a measurement error. It is the central fact of venture building. Every framework in this book is designed around that gap.
What the book covers
The book follows five founders through eight stages of The Behavioral Venture Process — from the first customer conversation to the launch decision. Each chapter covers one stage. Each stage produces something specific that becomes the input to the next.
Preface — Where the framework came from and why standard entrepreneurship tools leave the most important question unanswered.
Introduction — The behavioral science foundation, the six core constructs of the framework, and an introduction to the five founders whose ventures carry the argument through every chapter.
Chapter 1: Starting with the Customer, Not the Idea — Why the first question you ask determines everything that follows, and how to write an Opportunity Statement that is specific enough to be wrong.
Chapter 2: Coherence Is Not Evidence — How to build a Behavioral Business Model Canvas that traces every assumption to observable customer behavior — and why a canvas that reads smoothly is not a canvas that has been tested.
Chapter 3: Letting the Customer Prove You Wrong — How to design discovery conversations that generate real behavioral evidence rather than warm agreement.
Chapter 4: A Big Number Is Not a Market — How to size a reachable market by behavior rather than headcount, map the competitive landscape honestly, and test a position against a well-resourced competitor’s response.
Chapter 5: Build the Smallest Thing That Teaches You — How to design a minimum viable test around a single behavioral hypothesis and evaluate the results honestly.
Chapter 6: Your Evidence Already Has a Voice — How the behavioral evidence built across five stages becomes brand, channel, and acquisition strategy.
Chapter 7: The Numbers Are Just Behavior, Counted — How to build a financial model where every number traces to a behavior someone has actually observed.
Chapter 8: Ready Is a Decision — How to define launch readiness criteria in advance, read the checklist honestly, and make the call.
Epilogue: What the Evidence Builds — What the process leaves in a founder after eight stages, and where the five founders land.
Glossary — Key terms of The Behavioral Venture Process™, defined precisely for reference.
How to get the book
For paid Substack subscribers: Your PDF download is attached to this post. This is the complete book — all 42,000 words, cover to close — as your subscriber benefit. Download it, keep it, share it with a founder who needs it.
On Amazon Kindle: Available now at $12.99. Read it on any device with the free Kindle app.
→Buy on Amazon Kindle Here.
In print: A paperback edition at $19.99 is coming in the next few weeks. I will announce it here when it is live.
The Behavioral Science of Entrepreneurship and Innovation is the first book in the Behavioral Venture Process series. The second — The Behavioral AI Playbook: How Founders and Innovation Teams Research, Test, and Decide in the Age of AI — is forthcoming from Venture for All®.
Paid Subscribers can download the PDF version below.