‘Entrepreneurial Articles’

Darden professor Saras Sarasvarthy’s research on entrepreneurship serves as the topic for Inc. Magazine’s cover story this month.

“Sarasvathy likes to compare expert entrepreneurs to Iron Chefs: at their best when presented with an assortment of motley ingredients and challenged to whip up whatever dish expediency and imagination suggest. Corporate leaders, by contrast, decide they are going to make Swedish meatballs. They then proceed to shop, measure, mix, and cook Swedish meatballs in the most efficient, cost-effective manner possible.”

Read the article here: http://www.inc.com/magazine/20110201/how-great-entrepreneurs-think.html

I was reading an interview with Kevin Kelly and Steven Johnson in this month’s Wired that provides scientific evidence in support of the E* Society’s mission: most innovative ideas are not born from individuals. It is hard for an individual to fully grasp all the complexities and predict how society will react to a new innovation, but a group of thinkers can inspire and motivate each other, offer different perspectives and wisdom, and ultimately, create a new idea that fits the time and place. That’s exactly why the E* Society exists. We try to get the right people with the right ideas in a room together so they can make some magic. With that said, I’d like to facetiously propose a new tag-line: The E* Society, A Bordello Near Monticello.

Here is a quote from the interview:

Kelly: It’s amazing that the myth of the lone genius has persisted for so long, since simultaneous invention has always been the norm, not the exception. Anthropologists have shown that the same inventions tended to crop up in prehistory at roughly similar times, in roughly the same order, among cultures on different continents that couldn’t possibly have contacted one another.

Johnson: Also, there’s a related myth—that innovation comes primarily from the profit motive, from the competitive pressures of a market society. If you look at history, innovation doesn’t come just from giving people incentives; it comes from creating environments where their ideas can connect.

Kelly: The musician Brian Eno invented a wonderful word to describe this phenomenon: scenius. We normally think of innovators as independent geniuses, but Eno’s point is that innovation comes from social scenes,from passionate and connected groups of people.

Johnson: At the end of my book, I try to look at that phenomenon systematically. I took roughly 200 crucial innovations from the post-Gutenberg era and figured out how many of them came from individual entrepreneurs or private companies and how many from collaborative networks working outside the market. It turns out that the lone genius entrepreneur has always been a rarity—there’s far more innovation coming out of open, nonmarket networks than we tend to assume.

Kelly: Really, we should think of ideas as connections,in our brains and among people. Ideas aren’t self-contained things; they’re more like ecologies and networks. They travel in clusters.

Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From

An interesting article from the Wall Street Journal on how public speaking is a great way to grow your business. Find opportunities to get an audience and brush up on your public speaking skills. Getting yourself out there helps create an air of expertise and find new customers and business opportunities.