With a view to contributing to the growing literature on new market creation, we examined three groups of people – expert managers, expert entrepreneurs and novices – on how their experience influenced their decisions. All three groups were given the exact same new market creation task, asked to think aloud continuously as they made their decisions and their taped protocols analyzed for commonalties and differences. Not only did the three groups use very different heuristics, but they also systematically varied both in the outcomes they generated and in the particular point in the process where variations in outcomes were engendered. Moreover, these differences cohered well with the content of their experience and training, raising the provocative possibility that variations may be non-random. Combining our findings with previous studies that have found evidence for selection mechanisms being endogenous to managerial decisions, we confront the implications of non-random variations for an organization ecological perspective on new market creation.