In face to an imperfectly known future, entrepreneurs must proceed by trial-and-error. It is known that there are typically many failures for one success (see, e.g, the excellent book by Tim Harford: 'Adapt - Why success always start with failure'). For business entrepreneurship, there is the feedback of bankruptcies, but where is the feedback for institutional entrepreneurs? I can only think of social crises - with the extreme example of Lenin and Stalin for whom this feedback took 70 years to work. Is any of the scholars working with problems of institutional entrepreneurs examining this problem?
Are you familiar with Steve Blank's work? https://steveblank.com/ . Steve's "lean startup" process has been adopted by the United States National Science Foundation's Innovation Corps (I-CORPs). Basically, the whole purpose of the process is to seek feedback from potential customers of the product or service and learning from when your assumptions are wrong. Commonly, people working through the process find that they didn't even know who their customers would be at the outset. That is, often the customer (the person who spends the money) is not the end user.
As a patent practitioner/manager, I often ask inventors a similar question: "why doesn't this already exist?" The initial response can't be, "because I'm much more clever than everyone else." That might be the ultimate answer, but more diligence needs to be done before we know. The book, The Big Short, by Michael Lewis illustrates this (the movie is fun, but the book hammers this point home.
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