Book Notes: Innovation and Entrepreneurship

As with my other book notes, some passages are direct quotes and others are my own paraphrasing/summaries. Any footnotes or [brackets] are my personal comments.

Innovation & Entrepreneurship (1985), by Peter Drucker

Innovation and Entrepreneurship “The entrepreneur,” said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, “shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.”

All new small businesses have many factors in common. But to be entrepreneurial, an enterprise has to have special characteristics over and above being new and small. Indeed, entrepreneurs are a minority among new businesses. They create something new, something different; they change or transmute values. An enterprise also does not need to be small and new to be an entrepreneur. Indeed, entrepreneurship is being practiced by large and often old enterprises.

The entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes. As Joseph Schumpeter formulated it, his task is “creative destruction.” They see change as the norm and as healthy. Usually, they do not bring about the change themselves. But—and this defines entrepreneurship—the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.

When shifting resources to a more productive area, there is a risk the entrepreneur may not succeed. But if they are even moderately successful, the returns should be more than adequate to offset whatever risk there might be. One should thus expect entrepreneurship to be considerably less risky than optimization. Indeed, nothing could be as risky as optimizing resources in areas where the proper and profitable course is innovation, that is, where the opportunities for innovation already exist. Theoretically, entrepreneurship should be the least risky rather than the most risky course. [There are “hidden” risks of not being an entrepreneur.]

“Innovation,” then, is an economic or social rather than a technical term. It can be defined the way Say defined it, as changing the yield of resources. Or, as modern economists would tend to do, it can be defined in demand terms rather than in supply terms: changing the value and satisfaction obtained from resources by the consumer. Continue reading “Book Notes: Innovation and Entrepreneurship” →

My favorite books on business, management, investing and design

Out of the many books I’ve read in different subjects, below is a list of some of my favorites with some brief commentary for some of them. There are a few other “Mental Model” categories (psychology, history, economics, ecology, etc.) that I left out — hopefull they’ll be the subject of another post.

Business theory

The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses, Amar Bhide — extensive study of startups of all kinds, how they grow, what makes them successful (this is not a “help” book it is mainly observational)
Innovation & Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker — how companies should systematically innovate — lots of good startup/innovation strategies (it’s not random)
The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen — every businessperson or investor needs to read this (and the one below) — every industry’s value chain is disrupted at some point
The Innovator’s Solution, Clayton Christensen — expands on “Dilemma” with better explanations and examples — I think the “jobs to be done” concept is one of the most important in business
Competition Demystified, Greenwald + Kahn — how businesses capture value by building a moat, and what strategies to use if you have or don’t have one
The Halo Effect, Phil Rosonzweig — the anti-business-book — but still has great insights on how businesses work and how best to run them
Built to Last, Jim Collins — read this with The Halo Effect in mind — lots of good advice & stories (I like this much better than “Good to Great”)
The Strategy Paradox, Michael Raynor — dense at times but a great theory on why strategy is so hard
Hidden Champions, Hermann Simon

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Entrepreneurial Arbitrage

Arbitrage is “the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more markets: striking a combination of matching deals that capitalize upon the imbalance, the profit being the difference between the market prices.” Once the arbitrage spread closes, the profit is made and the opportunity no longer exists. According to Austrian Economics, entrepreneurs’ profits “derive from the services he performs in detecting and eliminating arbitrage opportunities, thereby allowing supply and demand for a given good to meet.” By recognizing and acting on opportunities, the entrepreneur moves markets toward equilibrium. So entrepreneurial arbitrage is a low-risk way of exploiting gaps between what the market demands and what it’s being supplied until the spread closes.

There is very little “invention” involved—startups imitate or slightly modify someone else’s idea and only introduce breakthrough products or new business models many years later. This is what Peter Drucker calls creative imitation. The technology and market demand already exist, but the creative entrepreneur understands what the innovation represents better than the original innovators. This also includes packaging current technologies into new business models. Paul Graham calls this an idea that’s “a square in the periodic table”—if it didn’t exist now, it would be created shortly.

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