Le cas entrepreneurial : retour à la maïeutique

The case method was inspired by the Socratic maieutics, rediscovered by the American pragmatists, at the end of the nineteenth century. The contributions by James and Dewey to the case approach are exposed. That method will be applied at the Harvard Law School, for trial decision learning, then, due to antitrust laws, at the Harvard Business School. However, the education for managers and executives used a systematic and procedural application, in place of a systemic and processual one, of managerial models to strategic problems solving of hierarchical organisations. The entrepreneurial learning implies to start from highly individual situations and problems, needing singular answers, got by interaction between principles and actions, including protagonists.