Innovation And Entrepreneurship Quotes
"The entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield."
"Not every new small business is entrepreneurial or represents entrepreneurship."
"Entrepreneurship is by no means confined solely to economic institutions."
"Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship."
"An incongruity is a discrepancy, a dissonance, between what is and what 'ought' to be, or between what is and what everybody assumes it to be."
"Entrepreneurship, it is commonly believed, is enormously risky."
"Successful entrepreneurs do not wait until 'the Muse kisses them' and gives them a 'bright idea'; they go to work."
"Every practice rests on theory, even if the practitioners themselves are unaware of it."
"Entrepreneurs see change as the norm and as healthy."
"Innovation, as these examples show, does not have to be technical, does not indeed have to be a 'thing' altogether."
"Incongruities do not, however, usually manifest themselves in the figures or reports executives receive and pay attention to. They are qualitative rather than quantitative."
"The essence of economic activity is the commitment of present resources to future expectations, and that means to uncertainty and risk."
"Entrepreneurship is 'risky' mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing."
"To be entrepreneurial, an enterprise has to have special characteristics over and above being new and small."
"The unexpected outside event may thus be, above all, an opportunity to apply already existing expertise to a new application, but to an application that does not change the nature of the 'business we are in.'"
"Long before the Japanese industrialist told his American audience that the poor in his country would not buy a TV set because they could not afford it, the poor in the United States and in Europe had already shown that TV satisfies expectations which have little to do with traditional economics."
"Any teenager could have told him that 'wheels' are not mere transportation but freedom, mobility, power, romance."
"What this firm sells is a chance to maintain one’s savings—through investment in bonds and stocks, to be sure, but also in deferred annuities, tax-sheltered partnerships, real estate trust, and so on."
"Behind the incongruity between actual and perceived reality, there always lies an element of intellectual arrogance, of intellectual rigor and dogmatism."
"Producers and suppliers almost always misconceive what it is the customer actually buys."
"The reaction of the typical producer and supplier is then to complain that customers are 'irrational' or 'unwilling to pay for quality.'"
"People who make cosmetics must believe in them; otherwise, they turn out shoddy products and soon lose their customers."
"People who run a hospital must believe in health care as an absolute good, or the quality of medical and patient care will deteriorate fast."
"To take another example, World War I had created a public in the United States for national and international news."
"That the purpose of a product or a service is to satisfy the customer. If this axiom is accepted and acted upon, using incongruity as an opportunity for innovation becomes fairly easy—and highly effective."
"Innovation is work. It requires knowledge. It often requires great ingenuity."
"Innovations have to be handled by ordinary human beings, and if they are to attain any size and importance at all, by morons or near-morons."
"The new always looks so small, so puny, so unpromising next to the size and performance of maturity."
"The enterprise that does not innovate inevitably ages and declines."
"In a period of rapid change such as the present, an entrepreneurial period, the decline will be fast."
"Entrepreneurial businesses treat entrepreneurship as a duty. They are disciplined about it...they work at it...they practice it."
"Innovation must be part and parcel of the ordinary, the norm, if not routine."
"There is only one way to make innovation attractive to managers: a systematic policy of abandoning whatever is outworn, obsolete, no longer productive."
"Every three years or so, the enterprise must put every single product, process, technology, market, distributive channel, on trial for its life."
"If the answer is 'No,' one does not respond with, 'Let’s make another study.' One asks, 'What do we have to do to stop wasting resources on this product, this market, this distributive channel, this staff activity?'"
"Sometimes abandonment is not the answer, and may not even be possible. But then at least one limits further efforts and makes sure that productive resources of men and money are no longer devoured by yesterday."
"Nothing so powerfully concentrates a man’s mind as to know that he will be hung in the morning," Dr. Johnson was fond of saying. Nothing so powerfully concentrates a manager’s mind on innovation as the knowledge that the present product or service will be abandoned within the foreseeable future."
"Nothing requires more heroic efforts than to keep a corpse from stinking, and yet nothing is quite so futile," is an old medical proverb.
"To allow it to innovate, a business has to be able to free its best performers for the challenges of innovation."
"Every organism needs to eliminate its waste products or else it poisons itself."
"Innovation requires major effort. It requires hard work on the part of performing, capable people—the scarcest resource in any organization."
"But if it is known throughout the organization that the dead will be left to bury their dead, then the living will be willing—indeed, eager—to go to work on innovation."
"The Business X-Ray furnishes the information needed to define how much innovation a given business requires, in what areas, and within what time frame."
"To be sure, some innovative efforts will do better than anyone expects, but others will do much less well. And everything takes longer than we hope or estimate; everything also requires more effort."
"Only when people with proven performance capacity have been assigned to a project, supplied with the tools, the money, and the information they need to do the work, and given clear and unambiguous deadlines—only then do we have a plan."
"The fact that America’s new ventures of the last few years have been doing so much better than new ventures used to do is largely because the new entrepreneurs in the United States have learned that entrepreneurship demands financial management."
"Cash management is fairly easy if there are reliable cash flow forecasts, with 'reliable' meaning 'worst case' assumptions rather than hopes."
"A growing new venture should know twelve months ahead of time how much cash it will need, when, and for what purposes."
"A new venture that had been financed by equity money now needs to shift to long-term debt, or vice versa."
"For new ventures other than those capable of being financed as separate units, capital planning is a survival necessity."
"Financial foresight does not require a great deal of time. It does require a good deal of thought, however."
"The new venture has successfully established itself in the right market and has then successfully found the financial structure and the financial system it needs."
"A lack of top management. The business has outgrown being managed by one person, or even two people, and it now needs a management team at the top."
"The reason is always the same: a lack of top management."
"Entrepreneurial management in the new venture, the need for independent, objective outside advice."
"In so many new ventures, especially high-tech ventures, the techniques discussed in this chapter are spurned and even despised."
"There are four specifically entrepreneurial strategies: Being 'Fustest with the Mostest', 'Hitting Them Where They Ain’t', Finding and occupying a specialized 'ecological niche', Changing the economic characteristics of a product, a market, or an industry."
"The toll-gate strategy; the specialty skill strategy; and the specialty market strategy."
"The entrepreneurial strategies discussed so far, being 'Fustest with the Mostest,' creative imitation, and entrepreneurial judo, all aim at market or industry leadership, if not at dominance."
"The 'ecological niche' strategy aims at control."
"While the specialty skill niche has unique advantages, it also has severe limitations."
"The occupant of a specialty skill niche is usually dependent on somebody else to bring his product or service to market."
"The greatest danger to the specialty niche manufacturer is for the specialty to cease being a specialty and to become universal."
"The specialty skill niche, like all ecological niches, is therefore limited—in scope as well as in time."
"The specialty market is found by looking at a new development with the question, What opportunities are there in this that would give us a unique niche."
"The specialty market niche... is built around a product or service and the latter around specialized knowledge of a market."
"What was new was that travelers checks were offered—in standard denominations."
"The specialty market niche has the same requirements as the specialty skill niche: systematic analysis of a new trend, industry, or market."
"The greatest threat to the specialty market position is success."
"The strategy works by enabling customers to do what serves their purpose."
"Price is usually almost irrelevant in the strategy of creating utility."
"What is being paid in the end is, of course, the same amount. But how it is being paid is structured to the needs and the realities of the consumer."
"The innovative strategy consists in accepting that these realities are not extraneous to the product, but are, in fact, the product as far as the customer is concerned."
"The customer has to be assumed to be rational. His or her reality, however, is usually quite different from that of the manufacturer."
"Entrepreneurial strategies are as important as purposeful innovation and entrepreneurial management."