A Case for Contextual Intelligence

In this perspective, I make a case for entrepreneurs and academics alike to focus on what I have referred to elsewhere as Contextual Intelligence, the ability to understand the limits of our knowledge, and to adapt that knowledge to a context different from the one in which it was developed. As befits this special issue on India, my work was originally motivated by the observation that some patterns, derived from analysis and introspection of data from a small sample of (typically OECD) countries were being presented as being valid ‘out of sample’, that is, applicable more universally, but these did not accord with my own intuition, largely shaped by Indian examples. I review how confronting such anomalies led to the articulation of the idea of institutional voids. This framework helps understand enduring differences in how economies are structured, and in the nature of the entrepreneurial opportunities and pitfalls they present. Superimpose on such enduring but underestimated differences the idea that mental models often persist unaltered, and the case for contextual intelligence becomes clear.