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By Daniel Isenberg
I love theories and arguments to be presented in storytelling format. And Columbia Business School's professor Isenberg makes a great case on innovation in business through stories of entrepreneurs around the world who defied conventions, popular thinking and local traditions. Enjoyable to read and interesting cases from around the world. Most notable? The Cinemex case in Mexico, Local Motors and examples from Slovenia and Iceland. Amazon Page for details My Rating: 7 / 10 Click Here to Read My Notes |
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Furthermore, much value can be created with what I have called minnovation—that unexpected twist on an existing idea, the incessant, often counterintuitive tweaks of the business model, the minor product adaptation, or even “just” the ability to put together and lead a fantastic team that is supremely resourceful in overcoming obstacles and driving the tweaked idea to market, that is, creating extraordinary value.
Even copycat business models completely devoid of innovation can create huge value; copies of Google, Groupon, and Amazon.com crop up and become big in unexpected markets.
“When I speak to potential entrepreneurs,” Davila reflects now, “I tell them, don’t expect that the sky’s going to open and a lightning bolt is going to hit you with the next Facebook idea. Those things are Haley’s comet—they come by once every hundred years. You don’t need to have that as entrepreneur. You just have to figure out something people need and find a way to execute it better than everyone else.”
If you had one dollar to invest, would you invest it in an innovator or an entrepreneur?
Most of us would agree that innovation has something to do with the tangible manifestation of novel ideas. But entrepreneurship is about the creation of tangible value.
But an unintended consequence of the use, or overuse, of this vaunted concept is that it can paradoxically intimidate some potential entrepreneurs who think that without that brilliant idea, they should stay put in their executive or professional positions and not take any risk to strike out on their own.
Whether we think it is an advantage or not, a priori experience in the subject matter is certainly not a prerequisite, even for highly technical endeavors.
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain (who is also on the X PRIZE
Foundation board) says, “The real disruptors will be those individuals who are not steeped in one industry of choice . . . but instead, individuals who approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities . . . non-expert individuals will drive disruptive innovation.”
Abhi Shah frequently repeats both to his staff and to my students when he visits my classes: “Thinking small is a crime.”
Rocky: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward . . . That’s how winning is done!”
As we see in numerous examples of entrepreneurship, striving to accomplish a big vision is one of the drivers of the creation and capture of extraordinary value, and the opposite belief that something is impossible (or worthless or stupid, as we will see later) is its inhibitor.
As we see throughout Worthless, “impossible” can be a lead indicator for entrepreneurial opportunity.
Entrepreneurs like Shah and Kuttner are able to use their confidence in themselves and their visions to convince others to believe in them, to see the world the way they see it, even if it doesn’t make sense at first.
Although I believe that ignorance is not bliss, entrepreneurs, whether experts or not, do need to view a market or an asset with completely fresh eyes to recognize or create new opportunities.
In our popular (and, I believe, inaccurate and even prejudicial) stereotypes about who can and cannot become an entrepreneur, Tochisako had three strikes against him. He was a top executive in a conservative bank, he was Japanese, and he was over fifty.
The more I think about it, the less it makes sense to me that the best age for entrepreneurship is predictable at all, or that the sectors or types of entrepreneurship should be much influenced by how old an entrepreneur is.
Can innovation, youth, and expertise be assets for an aspiring entrepreneur? Perhaps; perhaps not.
They certainly don’t need to be young. They don’t need to be an expert in something. And they don’t need to be innovators. Those are myths.
the more attractive, the better. Obvious, right? Evidently, this lesson does not hold for entrepreneurs, who, failing to listen to the “experts,” time and again transform unattractive industries in unattractive times into attractive opportunities. Entrepreneurs thrive in adversity; I guess they didn’t get the memo!
But with uncharacteristic humor for often dry hard-headed venture capitalists, BVP also wryly publicizes its “anti-portfolio,” all of the now wildly successful companies that the firm’s partners thought were too ridiculous to invest in.2 “[BVP’s] long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.”
Entrepreneurs pursue, create, and capture extraordinary value in spite of overwhelming negative feedback from the best professionals, the tops in their fields, not to mention “helpful” friends who know with certainty that the idea will never work.
As it turns out, it is exactly those outliers that have the potential to become the most successful (and the least successful as well).
Entrepreneurship, and the process of betting on it, may be impossible to systematize, precisely because of its contrarian nature.
That’s something I repeatedly emphasize to my students. It is the job of the entrepreneur to sniff out and realize opportunity that is overlooked, undervalued, or even berated by others.
Many potential entrepreneurs find themselves with the same agonizing dilemma as Rogers did that day; in fact, the most talented of them, those whom society and investors and customers would want to become entrepreneurs, are often the ones who have the most enticing alternatives to setting off down the risky entrepreneurial path.
Rogers was just beginning to experience for himself what most successful entrepreneurs also experience, repeatedly: they and their opportunities are greeted not with open arms and smiles, but with doors slamming in their faces, sometimes by their closest friends, allies, and mentors.
in fact, a slammed door can be impetus for the entrepreneur to look for a new door to discover, one with an opportunity behind it.
Bistany’s vision exemplified the view of private equity pioneer Sir Ronald Cohen: “Your business will grow to the size of your vision.
fame. Those who will end up succeeding don’t automatically censor themselves because certain problems are supposedly too difficult to solve or too complex to navigate or because opportunities are too remote to ever turn into something of value.
As FedEx’s Smith put it, “in retrospect it was ridiculous to try to put this system together, which required so much up front money, and required changing a lot of government regulations, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
Entrepreneurship is about seeing, not imagining, value where no one else does, acting on that perception, and then turning it into value for both customers and entrepreneur alike.
“Memories are the new luxury"
“You have to start seeing these not as another bloody pain you have to deal with, but as an opportunity. These are things that will make our competitors quit.
If entrepreneurship is so good, then why is it so difficult? Seeing value where no one else does is usually the first step on the path of entrepreneurship.
As Sam Walton once put it, “if everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
Seeing value in something worthless, viewing the impossible as an opportunity if it can be made possible, taking something seemingly stupid and turning it into something smart—that’s the contrarian nature of entrepreneurship.
“it should be difficult to start a new venture.
A degree of adversity strengthens the entrepreneur and weeds out those without the required mettle.
Adversity is not the special province of emerging economies, with their challenges of infrastructure and governance. It is found inside the DNA of every endeavor we call entrepreneurship, and overcoming those challenges is the proof of the mettle of the entrepreneur, even in the best of situations.
In hearing their stories, I have realized that experiencing significant amounts of hardship on the way to success is embedded in the experience of entrepreneurship itself.
It is the proverbial heat in the kitchen; if you cannot stand the heat, you need to just get out.
Every entrepreneur aspiring to create and capture extraordinary value will encounter adversity with his or her new product or idea—that is just a fact of entrepreneurial life; it goes with the territory.
As I have described in another publication, we can characterize any entrepreneurship environment in terms of six major domains: (1) policy and leadership, (2) capital availability and capital markets, (3) human capital and formal education, (4) customers and markets that are entrepreneur-friendly, (5) social norms and success stories, and (6) organizations that specifically support entrepreneurship.
Statistically, the odds are stacked against entrepreneurial success, that is, of creating and capturing extraordinary value.
Entrepreneurship = adversity + human capital
FOPSE, for for-profit social enterprise (pronounced foop-see).
Adversity, both intrinsic and extrinsic, is not just a set of obstacles for entrepreneurs to navigate around and for societies to remove: adversity is a driver of entrepreneurship—of perceived, created, and captured extraordinary value.
In founding Keggfarms, Kapur had set out to realize his life dream of building a company that would first and foremost bring income and nutrition to India’s huge population of poor, rural villagers, but at a profit, not just for Kapur, but for all the intermediaries and the end customers as well.
Even copycat business models completely devoid of innovation can create huge value; copies of Google, Groupon, and Amazon.com crop up and become big in unexpected markets.
“When I speak to potential entrepreneurs,” Davila reflects now, “I tell them, don’t expect that the sky’s going to open and a lightning bolt is going to hit you with the next Facebook idea. Those things are Haley’s comet—they come by once every hundred years. You don’t need to have that as entrepreneur. You just have to figure out something people need and find a way to execute it better than everyone else.”
If you had one dollar to invest, would you invest it in an innovator or an entrepreneur?
Most of us would agree that innovation has something to do with the tangible manifestation of novel ideas. But entrepreneurship is about the creation of tangible value.
But an unintended consequence of the use, or overuse, of this vaunted concept is that it can paradoxically intimidate some potential entrepreneurs who think that without that brilliant idea, they should stay put in their executive or professional positions and not take any risk to strike out on their own.
Whether we think it is an advantage or not, a priori experience in the subject matter is certainly not a prerequisite, even for highly technical endeavors.
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Naveen Jain (who is also on the X PRIZE
Foundation board) says, “The real disruptors will be those individuals who are not steeped in one industry of choice . . . but instead, individuals who approach challenges with a clean lens, bringing together diverse experiences, knowledge and opportunities . . . non-expert individuals will drive disruptive innovation.”
Abhi Shah frequently repeats both to his staff and to my students when he visits my classes: “Thinking small is a crime.”
Rocky: “It ain’t about how hard you can hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward . . . That’s how winning is done!”
As we see in numerous examples of entrepreneurship, striving to accomplish a big vision is one of the drivers of the creation and capture of extraordinary value, and the opposite belief that something is impossible (or worthless or stupid, as we will see later) is its inhibitor.
As we see throughout Worthless, “impossible” can be a lead indicator for entrepreneurial opportunity.
Entrepreneurs like Shah and Kuttner are able to use their confidence in themselves and their visions to convince others to believe in them, to see the world the way they see it, even if it doesn’t make sense at first.
Although I believe that ignorance is not bliss, entrepreneurs, whether experts or not, do need to view a market or an asset with completely fresh eyes to recognize or create new opportunities.
In our popular (and, I believe, inaccurate and even prejudicial) stereotypes about who can and cannot become an entrepreneur, Tochisako had three strikes against him. He was a top executive in a conservative bank, he was Japanese, and he was over fifty.
The more I think about it, the less it makes sense to me that the best age for entrepreneurship is predictable at all, or that the sectors or types of entrepreneurship should be much influenced by how old an entrepreneur is.
Can innovation, youth, and expertise be assets for an aspiring entrepreneur? Perhaps; perhaps not.
They certainly don’t need to be young. They don’t need to be an expert in something. And they don’t need to be innovators. Those are myths.
the more attractive, the better. Obvious, right? Evidently, this lesson does not hold for entrepreneurs, who, failing to listen to the “experts,” time and again transform unattractive industries in unattractive times into attractive opportunities. Entrepreneurs thrive in adversity; I guess they didn’t get the memo!
But with uncharacteristic humor for often dry hard-headed venture capitalists, BVP also wryly publicizes its “anti-portfolio,” all of the now wildly successful companies that the firm’s partners thought were too ridiculous to invest in.2 “[BVP’s] long and storied history has afforded our firm an unparalleled number of opportunities to completely screw up.”
Entrepreneurs pursue, create, and capture extraordinary value in spite of overwhelming negative feedback from the best professionals, the tops in their fields, not to mention “helpful” friends who know with certainty that the idea will never work.
As it turns out, it is exactly those outliers that have the potential to become the most successful (and the least successful as well).
Entrepreneurship, and the process of betting on it, may be impossible to systematize, precisely because of its contrarian nature.
That’s something I repeatedly emphasize to my students. It is the job of the entrepreneur to sniff out and realize opportunity that is overlooked, undervalued, or even berated by others.
Many potential entrepreneurs find themselves with the same agonizing dilemma as Rogers did that day; in fact, the most talented of them, those whom society and investors and customers would want to become entrepreneurs, are often the ones who have the most enticing alternatives to setting off down the risky entrepreneurial path.
Rogers was just beginning to experience for himself what most successful entrepreneurs also experience, repeatedly: they and their opportunities are greeted not with open arms and smiles, but with doors slamming in their faces, sometimes by their closest friends, allies, and mentors.
in fact, a slammed door can be impetus for the entrepreneur to look for a new door to discover, one with an opportunity behind it.
Bistany’s vision exemplified the view of private equity pioneer Sir Ronald Cohen: “Your business will grow to the size of your vision.
fame. Those who will end up succeeding don’t automatically censor themselves because certain problems are supposedly too difficult to solve or too complex to navigate or because opportunities are too remote to ever turn into something of value.
As FedEx’s Smith put it, “in retrospect it was ridiculous to try to put this system together, which required so much up front money, and required changing a lot of government regulations, but I didn’t know that at the time.”
Entrepreneurship is about seeing, not imagining, value where no one else does, acting on that perception, and then turning it into value for both customers and entrepreneur alike.
“Memories are the new luxury"
“You have to start seeing these not as another bloody pain you have to deal with, but as an opportunity. These are things that will make our competitors quit.
If entrepreneurship is so good, then why is it so difficult? Seeing value where no one else does is usually the first step on the path of entrepreneurship.
As Sam Walton once put it, “if everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.
Seeing value in something worthless, viewing the impossible as an opportunity if it can be made possible, taking something seemingly stupid and turning it into something smart—that’s the contrarian nature of entrepreneurship.
“it should be difficult to start a new venture.
A degree of adversity strengthens the entrepreneur and weeds out those without the required mettle.
Adversity is not the special province of emerging economies, with their challenges of infrastructure and governance. It is found inside the DNA of every endeavor we call entrepreneurship, and overcoming those challenges is the proof of the mettle of the entrepreneur, even in the best of situations.
In hearing their stories, I have realized that experiencing significant amounts of hardship on the way to success is embedded in the experience of entrepreneurship itself.
It is the proverbial heat in the kitchen; if you cannot stand the heat, you need to just get out.
Every entrepreneur aspiring to create and capture extraordinary value will encounter adversity with his or her new product or idea—that is just a fact of entrepreneurial life; it goes with the territory.
As I have described in another publication, we can characterize any entrepreneurship environment in terms of six major domains: (1) policy and leadership, (2) capital availability and capital markets, (3) human capital and formal education, (4) customers and markets that are entrepreneur-friendly, (5) social norms and success stories, and (6) organizations that specifically support entrepreneurship.
Statistically, the odds are stacked against entrepreneurial success, that is, of creating and capturing extraordinary value.
Entrepreneurship = adversity + human capital
FOPSE, for for-profit social enterprise (pronounced foop-see).
Adversity, both intrinsic and extrinsic, is not just a set of obstacles for entrepreneurs to navigate around and for societies to remove: adversity is a driver of entrepreneurship—of perceived, created, and captured extraordinary value.
In founding Keggfarms, Kapur had set out to realize his life dream of building a company that would first and foremost bring income and nutrition to India’s huge population of poor, rural villagers, but at a profit, not just for Kapur, but for all the intermediaries and the end customers as well.