Page 139 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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132 THE PRACTICE OF INNOVATION

exploit. And in these areas we know how to look, what to look for,
and what to do.
All one can do for innovators who go in for bright ideas is to tell
them what to do should their innovation, against all odds, be suc-
cessful. Then the rules for a new venture apply (see Chapter 15). And
this is, of course, the reason why so much of the literature on entre-
preneurship deals with starting and running the new venture rather
than with innovation itself.
And yet an entrepreneurial economy cannot dismiss cavalierly the
innovation based on a bright idea. The individual innovation of this
kind is not predictable, cannot be organized, cannot be systematized,
and fails in the overwhelming majority of cases. Also many, very
many, are trivial from the start. There are always more patent appli-
cations for new can openers, for new wig stands, and for new belt
buckles than for anything else. And in any list of new patents there is
always at least one foot warmer than can double as a dish towel. Yet
the volume of such bright-idea innovation is so large that the tiny per-
centage of successes represents a substantial source of new business-
es, new jobs, and new performance capacity for the economy.
In the theory and practice of innovation and entrepreneurship, the
bright-idea innovation belongs in the appendix. But it should be
appreciated and rewarded. It represents qualities that society needs:
initiative, ambition, and ingenuity. There is little society can do, per-
haps, to promote such innovation. One cannot promote what one does
not understand. But at least society should not discourage, penalize,
or make difficult such innovations. Seen in this perspective, the recent
trend in developed countries, and especially in the United States, to
discourage the individual who tries to come up with a bright-idea
innovation (by raising patent fees, for instance) and generally to dis-
courage patents as “anticompetitive” is short-sighted and deleterious.