Embracing Rogue Entrepreneurship: A Guide for Scottish SMEs

Entrepreneurship is now taught everywhere including classrooms, incubators, accelerators, and government-led startup initiatives. It’s wrapped in templates and toolkits. It’s become a system. However, in my opinion, there's a problem.

Some of us never fitted that system.

This article is not a takedown of entrepreneurship education. On the contrary, I owe much of my ability to communicate this experience to the rigour and frameworks I encountered in my recent MBA. I am grateful to those like Dr Cazulli, whose research (Mawson, Cazulli, and Rae, 2022) takes a deeply human approach to building entrepreneurial competence. This approach values not just action but reflection, identity, and self-awareness.

Nonetheless, rogue entrepreneurs (the ones who build when there is no data) act when others hesitate, and create from the outside, rarely walk through the front door. We’re not easy to teach because the classroom wasn’t where we first learned. We learned in and amongst chaos. We learned by losing and failing countless times. We learned because we had to.

This article is for those founders and builders who feel misaligned in formal systems. If you live in ideas too raw or early for mainstream logic, and you’re tired of being told to play smaller, this is for you. It’s not about breaking the rules. It’s about playing a different game entirely.

I'll blend lived experience, academic rigour, and commercial case studies to show why rogue entrepreneurship is not an attitude or a label but a repeatable pattern of creation that happens in the margins before reshaping the centre.

By Mark Evans MBA, CMgr FCMI – Aka Rogue Entrepreneur, Innovation Strategist, and Founder of 360 Strategy

Plans collapse. Rogues don’t. They convert rejection into insight. They build when no map exists. They prototype long before others agree it’s time to start. This field guide fuses three decades of lived experience with peer-reviewed evidence so, any SME leader can test a rogue move on Monday.

1. You Can’t Teach Rogue

Entrepreneurship is now codified. It’s taught in leading academic institutions, modelled in frameworks, and embedded in formal programmes.

However, rogue entrepreneurship, a term coined by McBride, Packard, and Clark (2023), is something else entirely. It is shaped by tension, refined by failure, and proven through action.

In my experience, rogue thinking is not a set of tools. It is a reflex developed, perhaps forged through repeated exposure to ambiguity. While most wait for green lights, rogues begin walking. While others test and de-risk in labs, rogues test in the market. While others iterate, rogues launch and adjust live.

Traditional institutions offer carefully plotted maps. Rogues create the terrain those maps eventually describe. That’s not to discredit education. There’s clear value in structured teaching and thoughtful models. But the rogue path is not one you begin by filling in someone else’s worksheet. It starts when you collide with reality and choose not to stop.

This is exactly the argument presented by Mawson, Cazulli, and Rae (2022) in their competence development framework. Rather than viewing entrepreneurship as a straightforward skillset, they highlight the importance of reflective learning, identity work, and adaptive interpretation - qualities that are developed under genuine pressure, rather than in controlled environments.

2. Rogue Entrepreneurship, in Plain English

Rogue entrepreneurs don’t ask for validation. They act and adjust often on the fly. Their question isn’t “Is this viable?” It’s “What happens if I move now?”

Pontikes and Barnett (2017) call these individuals “non-consensus entrants.” Labels aside, three behaviours stand out:

• Discomfort tolerance. Rogues operate in Knightian uncertainty yet still move (Packard, Clark, and Klein, 2017).

• Rules as reference points. They treat standard frameworks as options, not instructions.

• Emotional velocity. They build momentum by anchoring meaning, not just market data (Lackéus, 2018).

  
  

Building on this, McBride, Packard, and Clark (2023) show that rogues work outside prevailing institutional logic. Legitimacy is not granted but earned by acting where others will not, in domains considered too early, strange, or risky.

These individuals aren’t failed traditionalists; they are intentional outliers. Their edge comes from mental fluidity, the kind of “meta-cognitive flexibility” that Haynie, Shepherd, and Patzelt (2012) associate with innovative entrepreneurship.

Moreover, this isn't about risk addiction or defiance for its own sake. It’s about moving before the world catches up.

3. Damage, Disruption, and the Rogue Mindset

Many textbooks overlook one truth: early instability often becomes a competitive edge. I attended seven schools by the time I was fourteen. I didn’t just learn how to adapt; I had no choice but to. That experience developed pattern recognition, survival instincts, and an innate ability to read informal structures quickly.

As it turns out, my resilience wasn’t trained or conditioned in a seminar. It was tested and battle-forged in real time. Zhang and Arvey (2009) linked adolescent disruption with entrepreneurial drive. The causality isn’t noble suffering. It’s the formation of psychological tolerance for the unknown.

Moreover, Cacciotti et al. (2016) further show that fear of failure is not merely obstructive. When channelled, it enhances performance and deepens learning. Rogues don’t eliminate fear; they evolve to work alongside it.

Some of us are wired for the gaps. A landmark twin study by Nicolaou et al. (2008) reckons about a third of our urge to start something risky comes down to genetics, traits like novelty-seeking and higher risk tolerance. The rest is environment and hard knocks. That mix explains why a handful of us (the rogues) feel oddly comfortable with the uncomfortable, where most leaders stall. Our brains nudge us towards the unknown, and experience turns that nudge into an edge.

Research also shows that founders who thrive in ambiguity share another trait: high cognitive adaptability. They can recast fuzzy signals as actionable gaps (Haynie, Shepherd, and Patzelt, 2012).

These aren’t just academic models. They describe exactly how I behaved when everything often fell apart. When no one backed my ideas, I built anyway. When the room went silent after an investor pitch, I simply retooled and moved on. The market didn’t need to understand me on day one; it would (as i discovered) catch up.

4. The Hidden Cost of Being First

There’s a seductive appeal to being first. It's almost addictive: the excitement of a blank canvas, no competition, full freedom, and a story to tell that no one has heard. However, what gets overlooked is the cost of building without a playbook. First movers rarely get the rewards. They get all of the resistance.

Kim and Mauborgne (2005) popularised Blue Ocean Strategy, but they underplay the grind behind pioneering. Lieberman and Montgomery (1988) highlight that first movers absorb the cost of educating the market. They fund the learning curve. They get copied before they can scale. Furthermore, Rogers (2003) explains why: the early majority doesn’t like risk. They want validation. Innovators take the hits; followers get the gains.

I lived this first-hand. I founded Kommando in the early 2000s as Europe’s first guerrilla marketing agency, long before “experiential” became a buzzword. Later, I launched Nomadix Media in 2012, building first-to-world technology including iProjector and iWalker across nine countries that fused AI, location data, and real-time audience measurement into roaming media.

These weren't trends that we followed; they were markets we created. We invested many years proving guerrilla marketing and disruptive ambient technology could work for global brands and burned through piles of financial and emotional capital, building infrastructure for a category that didn’t yet exist.

By the time competitors arrived, our IP and global partnerships had to act as shields, or we’d be left with nothing but nice stories.

5. Defensive Moats for Rogue Builders

If you're going to operate ahead of the market, you have to protect your position. That means building the moat while laying the bridge.

Here’s what I learned first-hand:

• Protect your edge early with provisional patents or protected designs.

• Secure exclusivity with your first partners, distributors, or licensors.

• Engineer network effects so every user improves the value.

• Take control of the narrative through founder content and earned media.

• Cash flow is king. Being first is only an advantage if you’re also last to be replaced.

  
  

6. The Loneliness Tax

Founders who build on the edge face another cost: isolation. The farther ahead you operate, the fewer peers you have. Unlike other shared-market ventures, you can’t compare notes with anyone. There’s no blueprint. You’re often explaining the problem while simultaneously building the solution. It wears on you. The echo chamber isn’t external, it’s internal. I call this my 'invisible committee,' and their constant judgement is the toughest.

That loneliness is part of the price. And the clarity. You have to be comfortable with no validation for a long time. That’s what makes rogue thinking hard to teach and even harder to fake.

7. Rogue Lessons from Silicon Valley

Silicon Valley founders know this. They embed experimentation into the culture.

Silicon Valley practice	SME translation	Why it works
‘One‑way door’ bets (Bezos)	Cap risky projects at ≈ 10 % of gross profit	You learn fast yet never jeopardise the whole business
‘Always Day One’ mindset	Treat every release as a prototype	Stops complacency creeping into maturing products
Public test failures (SpaceX)	Invite real users into rough MVP phases	Builds loyalty and supplies brutally honest feedback

You don’t need to emulate the scale. But the philosophy translates.

8. Monday Checklist for Board-Level Rogue Thinking

• Identify one market norm that your competitors treat as gospel. Draft a plan to break it, carefully and fast.

• Revisit one legacy initiative your team deems 'unrealistic'. Assign a renegade thinker to redesign it.

• Book a meeting with a supplier or partner you've overlooked because they were 'too small'. Challenge that assumption.

• Allocate 5% of your next innovation budget to a high-risk prototype. Set a 30-day limit. Test for signal.

• Strip one customer promise back to its essence. Deliver it without friction.

  
  

You don't need to gamble the business. You just need to move first where others won’t.

9. Closing Thought: The Real Risk Isn’t Moving Too Fast. It’s Waiting Too Long.

Let me be clear: rogues are not reckless. We’re committed. That commitment often shows up long before the world is ready and that's the risk we absorb daily. Most leaders wait for clarity and consensus. Rogues trade comfort and sleep for progress and opportunity.

The price of inaction is no longer theoretical. The world is accelerating. Playing it safe as i explain to my clients, has become the most dangerous strategy of all. The question is not whether rogue thinking can be taught. The question is whether you're still willing to think that way.

This article isn’t asking you to follow my path. It’s asking whether you’re willing to clear your own.

Because if you are, the next move is all yours.

#SMEgrowth #entrepreneurship #rogueentrepreneurship #Startups

10. References:

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Cardon, M.S., Wincent, J., Singh, J. and Drnovsek, M. (2009) ‘The nature and experience of entrepreneurial passion’, Academy of Management Review, 34(3), pp. 511–532. Available at: https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.40633190 (Accessed: 24 July 2025).

Haynie, J.M., Shepherd, D.A. and Patzelt, H. (2012) ‘Cognitive adaptability and an entrepreneurial task: The role of metacognitive ability and feedback’, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 36(2), pp. 237–265. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1540-6520.2010.00410.x (Accessed: 24 July 2025).

Kim, W.C. and Mauborgne, R. (2005) Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Lackéus, M. (2018) ‘Emotional dimensions of entrepreneurship education’. Paris: OECD. Available at: https://www.emerald.com/ijebr/article/26/5/937/510601/Comparing-the-impact-of-three-competencies (Accessed: 24 July 2025).

Lieberman, M.B. and Montgomery, D.B. (1988) ‘First‑mover advantages’, Strategic Management Journal, 9(S1), pp. 41–58. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250090706 (Accessed: 24 July 2025).

Mawson, S., Casulli, L. and Rae, D. (2022) ‘A competence development approach for entrepreneurial mindset’, Education + Training, 64(6), pp. 817–838. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/365962097_A_Competence_Development_Approach_for_Entrepreneurial_Mindset_in_Entrepreneurship_Education (Accessed: 24 July 2025).

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Pontikes, E.G. and Barnett, W.P. (2017) ‘The non-consensus entrepreneur: Organizational responses to vital market events’, Strategy Science, 2(1), pp. 36–54. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0001839216661150 (Accessed: 24 July 2025).

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