A summary of things you should know about The Innovative Entrepreneur according to Daniel Spulber: Introduction In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The InnovativeRead More
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]]>In this episode Daniel Spulber takes a deep dive into his book, The Innovative Entrepreneur, where he shares the economic framework that addresses the motivation, advantages, pressures, consequences, and contributions of the innovative entrepreneur.
In his book, Spulber unveils an economic theory for innovative entrepreneurship that asks why people with new technologies start their own companies. The goal of the book is identify the costs that other companies incur to readjust their focus, and reveal the problems that arise in the market for new technologies.
This book is perfect for entrepreneurs who have a passion for creating new ideas and want to know the economical effects of creating their own company based on their ideas.
A lot of experts who do research on entrepreneurs really don’t think that entrepreneurs are that important. My book tries to show a little bit about why entrepreneurs are so important to our country, what they contribute and all along the way I think it yields some insights that may be helpful to individual entrepreneurs.
You can think of the book as a reference work or you can try and catch some of the highlights.
The number one thing that I would like the reader to takeaway is that innovation is a choice.
The book is organized around five major questions. The first big question that a lot of people have asked is what I call the question of entrepreneurial motivation. Why do individuals choose to become innovative entrepreneurs? Entrepreneurs have choices; individuals have other possibilities for their time. They may have a day job or other careers in progress and they have to weigh the returns and rewards or their careers against the returns and rewards of choosing to be an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs have other choices, they may have some money that they make investments with or pursue an education. They too have to make a decision whether they want to invest that money in the startup venture. Perhaps most importantly if they decide to be entrepreneurs they face another choice of whether to be a replicative entrepreneur or to pursue innovative entrepreneurship. One of the things that I point at as an answer to this important question is that I think individuals tend to make these choices in the context of the life cycle. In other words entrepreneurship is a way to build personal assets for the future while doing what you love to do. One way of understanding the entrepreneurship decision is not as a snapshot but it’s a major decision that falls within your life cycle decisions.
The second question is what I call the question of innovative advantage. And that is why does it seem that entrepreneurs are better at innovating than existing firms? This is important because a lot of people think that the big firm can do all the innovating. One of the many reason why existing firms can’t do it all is because they are faced with all kinds of inertia. It’s not just that managers are short sighted but rather the existing firm has to fund its existing business and it’s very hard to change directions particularly for big companies. The entrepreneurs have an advantage and that advantage is the key to my book. The advantage is that the entrepreneur is not a big organization or a small organization but they are often an individual and as an individual they have got the initiative. The initiative or personal decision can overcome any kind of inertia. Entrepreneurs bring change because they’ve got initiative and they can overcome the inertia that existing firms face.
The third question my book talks about is competitive pressures. Does competition help or hurt innovation? A lot of people are worried that too much competition hurts innovation but entrepreneurs know that they are going to face challenges and I think it’s really important to have competition and competitive pressures.
The fourth question is about creative destruction. Why do we see creative destruction and why not just sell out and avoid the competition? There are a number of reasons for this and one is that I think often is it is very difficult to sell or license your idea to the existing firm. Another idea is that often the person who comes up with the idea has the best way of realizing it. So even though you might cash out, you might do much better doing it yourself.
The fifth and final question is what I call the question of the wealth of nations. How do entrepreneurs affect the economy? This is really important because I think we’ve forgot that. Right now big companies have a grip on regulation and they have a big influence with the government and essentially it’s made it harder and harder for the little guy to get going. Regulations tend to favor big firms and tax rates tend to penalize individual success and so on. Understanding the important contribution that entrepreneurs make to the economy will help motivate entrepreneurs and it will shed a little bit of light on the public policy’s that we need to open the door to startups.
“The innovated entrepreneur is the man on the spot.” – Daniel Spulber
I am a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University here in Evanston Illinois. I have been teaching entrepreneurship and all kinds of topics for a long time so this is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Entrepreneurs are so important because they provide the creativity, the drive and the initiative that drives our economy forward. I wanted to make sure that entrepreneurs themselves had a better understand of the major contributions that they are making to our society. I also wanted public policy makers and experts in the field to have a better understanding of what entrepreneurship is and what it means to our country.
Free to Choose by Milton Friedman
Buy The Innovative Entrepreneur by Daniel Spulber on Amazon today
Visit Kellogg.NorthWestern.edu to learn more about Daniel and his studies
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Related books: The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | Inside The Box by Drew Boyd | The Maker Movement Manifesto by Mark Hatch
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Inside The Box according to Drew Boyd Introduction Inside The Box is the only book that details the method called systematic inventiveRead More
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]]>Inside The Box is the only book that details the method called systematic inventive thinking. Most of the books you deal with today on this topic are more about the why or how you execute innovation. Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg wrote the book with the intent to give people a way to understand creativity, the method, and the cognitive tools of how you use your brain in a different way to produce novel ideas you weren’t likely to produce without the method.
Our book is the only book that details the method called systematic inventive thinking. Most of the books you deal with today on this topic are more about the why or how you execute innovation. Very few, if any, really deal with the how and that’s what companies want to know. We wrote the book with the intent to give people a way to understand creativity, understand the method, the cognitive tools of how you use your brain in a different way to produce novel ideas you weren’t likely to produce without the method.
The idea that I would take out of the book is that innovation is a skill. Innovation is not a gift, it’s a skill that can be learned and learned in a systematic way by harnessing the power of patterns and how those patterns could regulate your thinking, channel your ideation and make you create concepts that you weren’t likely to have created on your own.
This book starts with an introduction to the method and so it’s essential that the readers read the introduction. In chapter one we dive into one of the most important principles called the closed world principle. The closed world is this imaginary boundary around where your product or services is being used. The closed world principle says that the farther away you have to go to import solutions to your problem, the less creative it’s going to be. In other words the most creative solutions are right under your nose.
Then the next five chapters detail each of the five techniques. Chapter two starts off with what’s called the subtraction technique. We finish the chapter with a specific list of steps you follow to use to subtraction technique and common pitfalls. We want people to avoid the routine mistakes that sometimes happen when using the technique.
Chapter three is the division technique. This chapter tells some stories about the prevalence of this particular pattern and the many products and services that the division technique can produce.
Chapter four is about the multiplication technique. Many innovated products have taken a component, created a copy of it but then changed the component into some counter-intuitive, non-obvious way.
The fifth chapter is called new tricks for old dogs; it’s about the task unification technique. Many innovated products have taken a component of the product and then assigned it an additional job. This technique produces some amazing innovations.
Chapter six is about the fifth and final technique. The title of the chapter is clever correlations, the attribute dependency technique. The majority of innovated products have taken an attribute of the product and created a dependency between them.
In chapter seven we talk about what are called contradictions. A contradiction is when you have two opposing ideas that can’t exist at the same time. In this chapter we show people how just the opposite is true, that contradictions are a source of creative thinking and we do this by showing people how to use the five techniques to solve contradictions.
Our final chapter is called final thoughts and here we are really try to give people a sense that creativity is the way you make the world a better place. We want people to feel the sense of empowerment, that they can learn innovation. Creativity is a skill; it’s not a gift or something you are born with. You can use these five techniques to boost your creative output no matter where you are in the creativity scale. The epilog tells the very nice story about my experience teaching children, as little as third grade, this method and the surprising result of how these children were so capable of using this method to produce innovated ideas. If a third grader can do it than people from all walks of life should be able to innovate with this message as well.
“The world leaders in innovation will also be the world leaders in everything else.” – Harry Mcalinden
I’m a professor at the University of Cincinnati but I’m really a corporate guy. I’ve been in large organizations for over 30 years and 17 of those years were at the global healthcare company, Johnson & Johnson which is where I learned this method that the book is about.
It’s really inspired from two perspectives; one is my time at Johnson & Johnson. We were very desperate to find an innovation method to create new medical products and we spent millions of dollars looking for a method. Just by chance I happen to find out about this method called systematic inventive thinking and we realized immediately that it was special, that it worked very well and I continued to practice it over the last 12 years. A few years later I met my co-author Dr. Jacob Goldenberg, it’s his research that this method is based on. He and I became friend, started teaching and working together when he asked if I wanted to write a book together. Without even thinking about it I said yes.
The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler
Buy Inside The Box by Drew Boyd on Amazon today
Visit InsideTheBoxInnovation.com for more information about the book
Visit InnovationInPractice.com for supplement content of the book
Follow Drew Boyd on Twitter and Pinterest
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Innovator’s Method by Nathan Furr | Scaling Up by Verne Harnish |
The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
Related advice and tips: 5 Steps to Promote Innovation in the Workplace
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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