Page 138 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

53231_Innovation and Entrepreneurship.qxd 11/8/2002 10:50 AM Page 131

The Bright Idea 131

This belief that you’ll win if only you keep on trying out bright
ideas is, however, no more rational than the popular fallacy that to
win the jackpot at Las Vegas one only has to keep on pulling the lever.
Alas, the machine is rigged to have the house win 70 percent of the
time. The more often you pull, the more often you lose.
There is actually no empirical evidence at all for the belief that
persistence pays off in pursuing the “brilliant idea,” just as there is no
evidence of any “system” to beat the slot machines. Some successful
inventors have had only one brilliant idea and then quit: the inventor
of the zipper, for instance, or of the ballpoint pen. And there are hun-
dreds of inventors around who have forty patents to their name, and
not one winner. Innovators do, of course, improve with practice. But
only if they practice the right method, that is, if they base their work
on a systematic analysis of the sources of innovative opportunity.
The reasons for both the unpredictability and the high casualty
rate are fairly obvious. Bright ideas are vague and elusive. I doubt that
anyone except the inventor of the zipper ever thought that buttons or
hooks-and-eyes were inadequate to fasten clothing, or that anyone but
the inventor of the ballpoint pen could have defined what, if anything,
was unsatisfactory about that nineteenth-century invention, the foun-
tain pen. What need was satisfied by the electric toothbrush, one of
the market successes of the 1960s? It still has to be hand-held, after
all.
And even if the need can be defined, the solution cannot usually
be specified. That people sitting in their cars in a traffic jam would
like some diversion was perhaps not so difficult to figure out. But
why did the small TV set which Sony developed around 1965 to sat-
isfy this need fail in the marketplace, whereas the far more expensive
car stereo succeeded? In retrospect, it is easy to answer this. But
could it possibly have been answered in prospect?
The entrepreneur is therefore well advised to forgo innovations
based on bright ideas, however enticing the success stories. After all,
somebody wins a jackpot on the Las Vegas slot machines every week,
yet the best any one slot-machine player can do is try not lose more
than he or she can afford. Systematic, purposeful entrepreneurs ana-
lyze the systematic areas, the seven sources that I’ve discussed in
Chapters 3 through 9.
There is enough in these areas to keep busy any one individual
entrepreneur and any one entrepreneurial business or public-service
institution. In fact, there is far more than anyone could possibly fully