This post is an extract of my forthcoming book on business model innovation. The innovation book looks at why business model innovation is needed and how it works. You can read more about it here. These posts are early drafts of planned content and I’m putting them out to get feedback. Please do comment below, or subscribe to these pages to get each new section as it is published. In today’s post, we will be looking at the importance of the idea in entrepreneurial success
The Idea
Over the course of the last twenty years, I’ve worked with thousands of entrepreneurs. They’ve come from almost everywhere. There have been Ugandan farmers and Nigerian restaurateurs. Argentine logisticians and American outsourced work specialists. I’ve worked on banking, property, marketing and gaming apps. Some of my clients have been just out of prison, twenty years of their lives gone. Others have been London socialites or broken down athletes looking for a burst of speed that gammy knees can no longer provide. There have been heroes from the dawn of the Internet and poster children for the woke and do good movements.
What has tied them all together is that they had a dream…
It didn’t matter what their skin colour was, whether their hair way grey or black or blond. Their sex and gender didn’t matter. In each f them there was a gleam. They saw something tat others didn’t.
After so many years I still don’t know what drives them. Is it the lure of money, making it big like the great entrepreneurial heroes? On the surface they want to be Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerburg. If that was true I think many more of them would have succeeded.
For most it is the lure of the frontier, the desire to escape from some convention or tradition that they find binds and ties them. Entrepreneurism is the new punk. Rebellion without being a rebel. A cause without a rebel.
The dream is not sufficient. In the vast majority of cases they have failed.
They have failed because of the dream.
It seems to work like this. A proto-entrepreneur is doing some sort of job. They get frustrated with some aspect of the job and then they have the realisation. That should be in CAPS. They realise that if only they did this, then the problem would go away and everyone would be happy. The world would be a better place.
What they are doing here is the modern equivalent of making an Is into an ought. There is a problem, and therefore my idea ought to be the solution. This does not work in moral philosophy and it doesn’t work in entrepreneurship either.
But entrepreneurs often get fixated on the ideas as a solution and this kills their business before it’s even begun.
I worked for an entrepreneur a few years ago. Edouard K. He was the archetypal immigrant hustler. He had made lots of money in trading and in his early thirties he had had an idea of how to change the market that he was in. Whilst the idea was brilliantly simple and clear to Edouard he could spend an hour explaining it to me and at the end of it as I summarised it back to him he would then spend another hour explaining why I had got everything wrong.
Still, Edouard was convinced that the idea was the way and he spent a significant amount of money building an app that would help ‘people’ solve the problem that he saw. As the app was built the product manager and I made increasingly desperate attempts to find the ‘people’ that the app was intended to help. This culminated in a day of cycling through South London looking for any sign that they existed. With multiple market tests showing that the audience did not exist Edouard still stuck to his belief in the idea…
I pushed the point.
He pushed me out. A few months later the idea fire balled into the stone face of reality.
That’s one of the more brutal stories of failure, but there is a rich seam of stories in the same strata. Why do entrepreneurs hang onto the idea? Why does it become so talismanic, so totemic that challenge of it, let alone abandonment is so threatening?
I worked with another entrepreneurial team. Guys with deep market knowledge and little marketing experience. Their path to unicorn status, they told me, would be based on the idea of ‘forced adoption’ – forcing customers to buy from them because… They didn’t have the guns, the money or the soft power to enforce this. At best what they had was an underlying political dynamic in the industry that opened up adoption of their solution as the least bad option for all the parties involved. But forced? Nope.
And yet over months and months of debate as we raised money this idea stayed there, rock-like, whilst everything else conformed to the market need.
This point is important.
For much of the rest of the book we will be talking about ideas, and how they will change the world. We have to start from this point. Many entrepreneurial ideas are crap. They are held onto for far too long. They should only ever be a launching pad. They are the start point of the journey, not the end point.
The entrepreneurs I’ve worked with who have done well have recognised this.
They have taken the idea and as they have got more and more market data they have refined it, tooled it, changed it so that it has become what their customers needed, not what their ego needed.
When Michaelangelo talked about how he created such amazing art he always claimed that he did nothing but uncover the beauty that God had placed in the marble. When we look for a new way forward out of the darkness we need to take the same approach.
The idea is the block of uncut marble that was brought to Michaelangelo’s workshop in Florence from the Monte Altissimo in Tuscany. If you take that block of Marble and put it in the Vatican, St Peters or the Medici Palace in Florance, then it will look pretty silly and not impress any one.
It is only when you start to look for the shape, the form inside the marble that you are able to start capturing the nature of David. Later in the book, we will go out and look for blocks of marble, but these are only the starting point of our work. Sometimes you find the stone to be sculpted lying by the wayside. Sometimes you have visions as to where it will be found. Other times you have to dig deep to find the idea that you really need.
The Idea is Only the Starting Point
However you find it there are two laws.
- The idea is only the starting point
- The irrelevant stone has to be slowly and patiently carved away to reveal the real genius.
As small business owners what we learn from this is two fold. First, many of the entrepreneurs out there are no real threat. Their psychology prevents them from digging deep enough to understand enough to make them dangerous. Instead they lurk around the margins destroying value and margins in their attempt to succeed. Instead they only make life harder for everyone.
Secondly, many SME owners dismiss far too many ideas because they see them for what they are – lumps of stone that don’t fit, don’t work and add no value. That is what we need to change.
If You Want to Read More
I keep everything structured on my niftily titled business model innovation book page. Head there to browse, binge, read straight through or cherry pick. Please do take a moment to comment below or upvote comments that you agree with
Subscribe to the New Book Chapters
As I write each new section you can have them sent to your email. The plan is to write something 2 – 3 times a week. It is easy to unsubscribe, but I hope you won’t as the goal is to delight and entertain as well as educate and train you through this business model innovation journey.
