Jan 28, 2026

Why Entrepreneurship Needs a New Model, According to Two Tuck MBAs

By Adam Sylvain

Co-authors of the new book, One Size Fits None: Time for an Entrepreneurial Revolution, Mim Plavin-Masterman T’98 and Alejandro Crawford T’02 believe existing innovation and funding models are due for a shakeup. The book and their podcast What If Instead? explore examples of everyday people reimagining how things work and developing innovative solutions to the challenges they face.

A consultant-turned academic, Plavin-Masterman earned a PhD in Sociology from Brown University and has taught in the business program at Worcester State University for the past 12 years. Her research and teaching focus on irrational decision-making in different areas of the economy and its impact on people, organizations, and society. Crawford is clinical professor of innovation and entrepreneurship for the Bard MBA in Sustainability and cofounder and CEO of RebelBase, a digital platform that provides tools and resources for teams to solve problems, replace what’s failing, and build what’s next. He also cofounded and serves on the board of the nonprofit Democratizing Innovation Institute, which works to make it normal for people everywhere to confront broken systems with experiments of their own.

We spoke with both of them about their collaboration and what they hope readers will take away from the book.

What inspired you to co-author One Size Fits None? In a nutshell, what do you mean by an “entrepreneurial revolution”?

PLAVIN-MASTERMAN: Alejandro and I have known each other since high school, and a few years ago we reconnected. As we discussed the entrepreneurial work he was enabling with RebelBase and my own research on irrational decisions, we realized there was an important question at the intersection of our experiments and research. Our experiences had convinced us both that when it comes to local problems, the model of entrepreneurship that currently dominates our institutions—from Silicon Valley to large companies and governments—is leading to a lot of big, one-size-fits-all solutions that don’t address specific contexts or situations.

We began to explore what a different approach to entrepreneurship might look like. Initially, we thought maybe this was a research article, then we published a few op-eds, and ultimately, I think it was Alejandro who said, “This feels like a book!”

CRAWFORD: At the same time Mim was conducting her research, bringing a sociological lens to business decision-making, I was running into surprising takeaways as we surveyed people running experiments on RebelBase. For example, we were seeing that contrary to the image of the innovator or entrepreneur as special, users built an experimental mindset through conducting real-world experiments.

We saw this effect not only among my Bard MBAs in Brooklyn, but also among users around the world, ranging from internal users at a key power generation organization in the US to entrepreneurs in the South African townships.

PLAVIN-MASTERMAN: As Alejandro and I talked and studied, our work became a diagram where we were mapping out examples of unresponsive systems and what they had in common. Those connections caused us to examine why unresponsiveness seems to be a key feature in the systems that organize our life and work.

CRAWFORD: This led us to understand the risks of the genius myth and the assumption that solutions to big problems require large-scale, top-down remedies. It showed us how this expands what we call “life in cattle class” across industries.

Imagine yourself at a counter or on a phone call trying to explain what’s actually happening to someone who’s trying to get the system to deal with it, and you’ll know what we mean. At the same time, the clues weren’t all dismal. The threads also led us to an alternative where instead of privileging a few people’s ideas, we create modern versions of testing grounds like Kitty Hawk for people to run their own experiments and create solutions.

Who did you write One Size Fits None for, and what do you most hope readers take away from it?

PLAVIN-MASTERMAN: There are three primary audiences. It’s a book for academics who are interested in teaching entrepreneurship and innovation through a different lens. It’s for people who want to be changemakers in their own organizations. There’s also this third group of people who share a common experience of spending three hours trying to get their cell phone updated or trying to make a change to their insurance policy, and they’re telling you these stories and they’re mad. I would say justifiably so.

But the hope is that the book frames those experiences as a starting point, not an ending point. We’ll show you why this is happening, how it got to be this way, and why it doesn’t have to stay that way. We want to help people move from being mad to being inspired to do something better and make real change.

CRAWFORD: Most of us can recall a time when we knew something was off—that it was changing or getting worse in a way that just didn’t add up—but we didn’t have a framework for making sense of it. Or worse, the old framework that had seemed to explain things was no longer doing the job.

And then suddenly you read something and you have a way to articulate what you’ve been seeing, and you feel almost vindicated. It goes back to that diagram: suddenly the pieces start to make sense.

Working with Mim makes you incredibly rigorous about this. She’s the detective who will go deep in the investigation but insist that you prove the connection together. That’s why there are so many sources behind our book.

Every week there are news stories that I read differently based on what we uncovered through our investigations for the book. I can connect the dots and ask better questions based on the work we’ve done. I hope others who read One Size Fits None will get this out of it too, and that it will spur their own investigations.

As people are reading in their offices, on their campuses, or on the subway, I hope it also becomes a vehicle for conversation and continued engagement in the topics we explore in the book.

You also co-host the podcast What If Instead? How did that collaboration begin, and what kinds of conversations do you explore there?

PLAVIN-MASTERMAN: We started talking to people who were trying to make the changes that we discussed in the book. These are people trying to redo the economics for small coffee growers in South America, for example, or Tuck alumni doing things like wildfire resilience in homebuilding.

We’ve interviewed economists and innovators in regenerative agriculture, peer-to-peer energy usage, and other topics. It’s been wide-ranging. These started out as interviews for the book, but there was so much to discuss, the podcast has allowed us to open up the conversation in a lot of ways.

CRAWFORD: In One Size Fits None, we draw on a number of the interviews we did in the podcast. I suspect the more free-flowing conversational format of the podcast allowed us to get to ideas that became pivotal in the book.

The podcast format allows you to follow the clues—to hear a statement and challenge the guest to go deeper, so they end up getting beyond their talking points to ideas that surprise all of us. The book format, for its part, lets you find the throughlines and explore how it all fits together in a way that we’re not able to explore in a single conversation with a single guest.

I enjoy seeing these distinct conversations—from the podcast, to books and articles Mim and I would send each other—knit together into a single, systemic inquiry.