Entrepreneurship as History Making

There is so much confusion about who entrepreneurs really are. They're mushed up together with small business owners and even independent insurance agents! So I want to tell you how I distinguish entrepreneurs from other folks.

To my mind, entrepreneurs are people who invent a product or service and form a company to deliver that invention that operates in a new way because of that invention. Admittedly that diminishes the number of entrepreneurs around, but it also means we can see them more clearly and can honor their history making task.[1]

The whole point about entrepreneurs is that they see things that could be, see why they would be useful, make them, and get them distributed to the rest of us. There may be a number of iterations before they get it right, but the concept won't let go of them. Sometimes it's as though the idea itself wants to be born.

Entrepreneurs are not working on projects that the rest of us want or think would be great. Those people are innovators -- the people who are working in organized clusters, or taking next steps from a prior invention. Innovators are really great to have around and they should be supported, too. But they're not entrepreneurs.

Sole proprietors and small business owners are worthy of our interest and support, too. They create jobs, serve us delicious food in new restaurants, and help us invest our retirement funds. We already know how to work with these folks. But unless they are the founders of the business, they are not entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are hard to spot (and even harder to support), partly because we don't see what they see and we really don't know how to use what they're offering us at first. For instance, we used to plan get-togethers with our friends before we had telephones.  We didn't know we were missing the ability to meet up spontaneously or notify our friends about last minutes changes in plans. And we didn't know we needed to.

An entrepreneur may have a hard time convincing investors of the value of his idea. She can't very well write a business plan complete with market research, competitive analysis or potential ROI on something that hasn't already been proven to work.

Yet with hindsight, we see how entrepreneurs have changed not only our world but the way in which we see ourselves. Affordable cars meant urban and suburban planning that accommodated individual transport, a huge industry that drove (pun, intended or not) our economy to a large extent, and that wonderful American icon, the soccer mom. We need to learn to tolerate creativity and failure so that entrepreneurs can bring us our new ways. Once we get them, we won't know how we lived without them!



[1] I am indebted to Charles Spinosa, et al and their book, Disclosing New Worlds, for articulating this idea more clearly than I had been doing. See: http://tinyurl.com/6zbd64k for more.

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