Page 107 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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100 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

Twenty-five years ago, even minor improvements in the nation’s
health were seen as major steps forward. Now, even major improve-
ments are barely paid attention to.
Whatever the causes for this change in perception, it has created
substantial innovative opportunities. It created, for instance, a market
for new health-care magazines: one of them, American Health,
reached a circulation of a million within two years. It created the
opportunity for a substantial number of new and innovative business-
es to exploit the fear of traditional foods causing irreparable damage.
A firm in Boulder, Colorado, named Celestial Seasonings was start-
ed by one of the “flower children” of the late sixties picking herbs in
the mountains, packaging them, and peddling them on the street.
Fifteen years later, Celestial Seasonings was taking in several hun-
dred million dollars in sales each year and was sold for more than $20
million to a very large food-processing company. And there are high-
ly profitable chains of health-food stores. Jogging equipment has also
become big business, and the fastest-growing new business in 1983 in
the United States was a company making indoor exercise equipment.
2. Traditionally, the way people feed themselves was very largely
a matter of income group and class. Ordinary people “ate”; the rich
“dined.” This perception has changed within the last twenty years.
Now the same people both “eat” and “dine.” One trend is toward
“feeding,” which means getting down the necessary means of suste-
nance, in the easiest and simplest possible way: convenience foods,
TV dinners, McDonald’s hamburgers or Kentucky Fried Chicken,
and so on. But then the same consumers have also become gourmet
cooks. TV programs on gourmet cooking are highly popular and
achieve high ratings; gourmet cookbooks have become mass-market
best-sellers; whole new chains of gourmet food stores have opened.
Finally, traditional supermarkets, while doing 90 percent of their
business in foods for “feeding,” have opened “gourmet boutiques”
which in many cases are far more profitable than their ordinary
processed-food business. This new perception is by no means con-
fined to the United States. In West Germany, a young woman physi-
cian said to me recently: “Wir essen sechs Tage in der Woche, aber
einen Tag wollen wir doch richtig speisen (We feed six days, but one
day a week we like to dine).” Not so long ago, “essen” was what ordi-
nary people did seven days a week, and “speisen” what the elite, the
rich and the aristocracy, did, seven days a week.
3. If anyone around 1960, in the waning days of the Eisenhower