The journey of entrepreneurship is by far, a journey of idea metamorphosis. Well known fact. You have an idea, build a product, hope that many people will use the product and eventually pay for it. It's a tiresome journey. Some entrepreneurs thrive though the journey, some fail to go beyond the first few steps, some get intimidated, some stop the journey at the last minute and, very few end the journey well and a select few of those continue on other journeys.
One of the reasons cited for these failures is that the entrepreneur shifts focus rapidly and doesn't focus on one idea. Going by Linus Pauling's quote, that shouldn't be the case at all. I mean, after all he's a Nobel laureate and his words better have some value. He says that the best way to get a good idea is to have many ideas. Given this, ideally, an entrepreneur should experiment with a variety of ideas before zeroing on 'the idea'. Have all successful entrepreneurs done this - no.
But that's a wrong metric to look at. What we have to instead look at are successful products, not successful entrepreneurs. Products and more specifically product cycles are very measurable. Most of the old product data is public data (The ones that have passed the innovation protection period). If we look at any of the successful and innovative products, we will find a common trait. The final product was an evolution of a variety of ideas. Most of the initial ideas of these classy products were discarded. These ideas, what we commonly call as prototypes are the key to a successful product and hence to a successful enterprise/company.
I personally failed to understand this concept all these days. I got carried away with the fact that the first idea that I got should be 'THE IDEA' and I went after it. I now think that's not necessarily correct. What's far more important is the GOAL. So I think it makes a lot of sense to have an end goal and be open to iterate through many ideas/prototypes that will lead to some form of the end goal. Figuring out this end goal is really difficult. Perhaps in the next post I'll write about possible ways of figuring out the end goal.
One of the reasons cited for these failures is that the entrepreneur shifts focus rapidly and doesn't focus on one idea. Going by Linus Pauling's quote, that shouldn't be the case at all. I mean, after all he's a Nobel laureate and his words better have some value. He says that the best way to get a good idea is to have many ideas. Given this, ideally, an entrepreneur should experiment with a variety of ideas before zeroing on 'the idea'. Have all successful entrepreneurs done this - no.
But that's a wrong metric to look at. What we have to instead look at are successful products, not successful entrepreneurs. Products and more specifically product cycles are very measurable. Most of the old product data is public data (The ones that have passed the innovation protection period). If we look at any of the successful and innovative products, we will find a common trait. The final product was an evolution of a variety of ideas. Most of the initial ideas of these classy products were discarded. These ideas, what we commonly call as prototypes are the key to a successful product and hence to a successful enterprise/company.
I personally failed to understand this concept all these days. I got carried away with the fact that the first idea that I got should be 'THE IDEA' and I went after it. I now think that's not necessarily correct. What's far more important is the GOAL. So I think it makes a lot of sense to have an end goal and be open to iterate through many ideas/prototypes that will lead to some form of the end goal. Figuring out this end goal is really difficult. Perhaps in the next post I'll write about possible ways of figuring out the end goal.
