Page 247 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

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240 ENTREPRENEURIAL STRATEGIES

for the specialty to cease being a specialty and to become universal.
The niche that the Viennese counter-traders now occupy was occupied
in the 1920s and 1930s by foreign exchange traders who were mostly
Swiss. Bankers of those days, having grown up before World War I,
still believed that currencies ought to be stable. And when currencies
became unstable, when there were blocked currencies around, curren-
cies with different exchange rates for different purposes, and other such
monstrosities, the bankers did not even want to handle the business.
They were only too happy to let the specialists in Switzerland do what
they thought was a dirty job. So a fairly small number of Swiss foreign
exchange traders occupied a highly profitable specialty skill niche.
After World War II, with the tremendous expansion of world trade, for-
eign exchange trading became routine. By now every bank, at least in
the major money centers, has its own foreign exchange traders.
The specialty skill niche, like all ecological niches, is therefore
limited—in scope as well as in time. Species that occupy such a
niche, biology teaches, do not easily adapt to even small changes in
the external environment. And this is true, too, of the entrepreneurial
skill species. But within these limitations, the specialty skill niche is
a highly advantageous position. In a rapidly expanding new technol-
ogy, industry, or market, it is perhaps the most advantageous strategy.
Very few of the automobile makers of 1920 are still around; every sin-
gle one of the electrical and lighting systems makers is. Once attained
and properly maintained, the specialty skill niche protects against
competition, precisely because no automobile buyer knows or cares
who makes the headlights or the brakes. No automobile buyer is
therefore likely to shop around for either. Once the name “Baedeker”
had become synonymous with tourist guidebooks, there was little
danger that anybody else would try to muscle in, at least not until the
market changed drastically. In a new technology, a new industry, or a
new market, the specialty skill strategy offers an optimal ratio
between opportunity and risk of failure.

III

THE SPECIALTY MARKET
The major difference between the specialty skill niche and the
specialty market niche is that the former is built around a product or