Entrepreneurship and age

Interesting and provocative article by “Schumpeter” in The Economist* turning on its head the idea that entrepreneurs are predominantly the young.

Among the examples he cites of creativity stretching well into “Third Age” are The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney and Leonard Cohen.

Then, digging into recent research, Schumpeter says that in the USA “twice as many successful founders [of start-ups] are over 50 as under 25, and twice as many over 60 as under 20.”

And he says that research shows that “the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity [is] among people aged 55 to 64 – and the lowest rate among the Google generation of 20 to 34 year-olds.”

So what might we conclude?

1.That experience coupled with creativity is critically important to successful entrepreneurship, and that

2.Maybe it’s more a generational thing more than an age thing. After all, the examples he quotes all come from the 1960s generation that considered creativity to be of the essence. Talkin' 'bout my generation. Schumpeter doesn’t seem to have considered this possibility.

Time will tell!

* http://www.economist.com/node/21548135

Keats and prototyping

Seems an unlikely connection, I admit.

This is what the great poet wrote in a letter to his brother and sister, George and Georgiana Keats, in 1819:

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.”

He continued: “Even a Proverb is no proverb to you till your Life has illustrated it...”

So, in innovation, it’s important to make whatever you are developing as tangible as possible, whether it’s a new product or service, or a new vision, mission, strategy, values statement, way of working – or a poem.

This is as much so that the inventors can play with it, discovering in practice what works well and what does not, as for putting it in front of consumers, customers, colleagues and other "stakeholders".

CEOs and innovation training

A recent study by PwC/Accenture shows that globally 80% of CEOs believe that innovation will drive efficiencies and lead to competitive advantage.

Percentages very close to this come up in most surveys of top managers, time after time.

The problem of course remains that the majority of CEOs themselves have very limited training or hands-on experience in the field of innovation. Most of them attended business school and grew through the ranks at a time when specialised training was not widely available, and many have not actively worked in an innovation function.

It would perhaps be OK if several of them recognised this and went about fixing it. But in my experience that very rarely happens.

So classic problems remain within organisations as barriers to successful innovation – problems not only of climate and culture and inappropriate personal behaviour, but also the belief that having a standardised innovation process is the primary route to glory.

Many organisations would benefit from an honest, root and branch review of their innovation capabilities, coupled with the open-mindedness to deal with whatever issues emerge, starting with the CEOs themselves.

Throughout my time in innovation, I’ve found that CEOs think that innovation training is important, but only for THEM, not for ME.

“Heavier than air flying machines are impossible”

This was the judgement of Lord Kelvin, President of the Royal Society, in 1895, just eight years before the Wright Brothers actually did it. And he repeated this pronouncement the year before their historic first flight in 1903.

Of course, attempts to fly had been made for centuries. The earliest documented is from Ancient Greece. Leonardo da Vinci famously designed a sort of helicopter in 1493. Over the following centuries dozens of inventors, many of them excellent engineers, had tried and failed.

Was Kelvin an ignorant fool? Quite the reverse. As Bill Bryson notes in his A Short History of Nearly Everything: “He was admitted to Glasgow University at the exceedingly tender age of ten… In the course of a long career he wrote 661 papers, accumulated 69 patents (from which he grew abundantly wealthy) and gained renown in nearly every branch of the physical sciences. Among much else, he suggested the method that led directly to the invention of refrigeration, devised the scale of absolute temperature that still bears his name… His theoretical work, in electromagnetism, thermodynamics and the wave theory of light, was equally revolutionary.”

No. The central problem was that Kelvin assessed the possibilities of powered flight as an expert, and as the revered President of the Royal Society, from the perspective of existing knowledge and experience, all of which appeared to confirm his judgement.

This is exactly the problem facing senior managers when they are confronted with any breakthrough idea. Experience often tells them that it’s been tried before and didn’t work. That it’s not feasible. That it’s quite likely even "absurd". I often think that it’s a kind of miracle when big new ideas get approved for implementation by senior management, especially in large, often risk-averse organisations.

How do you address this issue? And how do you ensure that you’re not being a latter-day Kelvin yourself?