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Indeed, high tech is the one sector that is not part of this new “technology,” this “entrepreneurial management.” The Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneurs still operate mainly in the nineteenth-century
Yet he so totally mismanaged the businesses he started that he had to be removed from every one of them to save it. Much, if not most high tech is still being managed, or more accurately mismanaged, Edison’s way.
Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture.
They create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.
The modern university as we know it started out as the invention of a German diplomat and civil servant, Wilhelm von Humboldt, who in 1809 conceived and founded the University of Berlin with two clear objectives: to take intellectual and scientific leadership away from the French and give it to the Germans; and to capture the energies released by the French Revolution and turn them against the French themselves, especially Napoleon.
Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.
Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves.
But—and this defines entrepreneur and entrepreneurship—the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.
There is no such thing as a “resource” until man finds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock.
But purchasing power is the creation of the innovating entrepreneur.
But this humdrum innovation roughly quadrupled the productivity of the ocean-going freighter and probably saved shipping.
It has converted modern society into something brand new, something, by the way, for which we have neither political nor social theory: a society of organizations.
Jean Bodin, sixty years later, have surely had more lasting impacts than most technologies.
Technology can be imported at low cost and with a minimum of cultural risk. Institutions, by contrast, need cultural roots to grow and to prosper.
Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.
And thus the discipline of innovation (and it is the knowledge base of entrepreneurship) is a diagnostic discipline: a systematic examination of the areas of change that typically offer entrepreneurial opportunities.
The incongruity—between reality as it actually is and reality as it is assumed to be or as it “ought to be”
New knowledge, both scientific and nonscientific.
Yet the unexpected success is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it.
Like the other early American computers, the IBM computer was designed for scientific purposes only. Indeed, IBM got into computer work largely because of Watson’s interest in astronomy.
young Japanese, Tamon Iwasa, seized on this crisis as an innovative opportunity. He redesigned the traditional highway reflector so that the little glass beads that serve as its mirrors could be adjusted to reflect the headlights of oncoming cars from any direction onto any direction. The government rushed to install Iwasa reflectors by the hundreds of thousands. And the accident rate plummeted.
The second clear focus is a market focus. Knowledge-based innovation can aim at creating the market for its products.
So Edison could sell and install electric power while Swan was still trying to figure out who might
interested in his technical achievement.
Yet bright ideas are the riskiest and least successful source of innovative opportunities.
Successful innovators are conservative. They have to be. They are not “risk-focused” they are “opportunity-focused.”
A company therefore should have under way at least three times the innovative efforts which, if successful, would fill the gap.
unambiguous deadlines—only then do we have a plan. Until then, we have “good intentions,” and what those are good for, everybody knows.
They are an excellent vehicle for upward communications, the best means to enable juniors, and especially professionals, to look up from their narrow specialties and see the whole enterprise. They
The most valuable achievement may well be entrepreneurial vision, receptivity to innovation, and “greed for new things” throughout the entire organization.
The best, and perhaps the only, way to avoid killing off the new by sheer neglect is to set up the innovative project from the start as a separate business.
Whether the responsibility for innovation rests with the chief executive officer, with another member of top management, or with a separate component, whether it is a full-time assignment or part of an executive’s responsibilities, it should always be set up and recognized both as a separate responsibility and as a responsibility of top management.
But both kept to themselves the entrepreneurial responsibility within their companies. Both depended on the “entrepreneurial personality” and did not embed the entrepreneurial spirit in specific policies and practices.
Companies that have built entrepreneurial management into their structure—Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Marks and Spencer—continue to be innovators and entrepreneurial leaders decade after decade, irrespective of changes in chief executives or economic conditions.
As long as the CEO’s work program consists of key activities, he or she does a CEO’s job. But the CEO also is responsible for making sure that all the other key activities are adequately covered.
Since he is not very gifted in either area, he does poorly in both. It also takes him forever to reach decisions or to do any work in these areas, so that he is forced, by lack of time, to neglect what he is really good at and what the company depends on him for, the development of new technology and new products.
“What will the venture need objectively by way of management from here on out?”
