Page 264 - ENTREPRENEURSHIP Innovation and entrepreneurship

53231_Innovation and Entrepreneurship.qxd 11/8/2002 10:50 AM Page 257

Conclusion: The Entrepreneurial Society 257

sure, IBM made very good money quite early. And one after another
of the “Seven Dwarfs,” the smaller American computer makers,
moved into the black during the late sixties. But these profits were off-
set several times over by the tremendous losses of all the others, and
especially of the big old companies who failed totally in computers:
General Electric, Westinghouse, ITT, and RCA in America; the
(British) General Electric Company, Ferranti, and Plessey in Great
Britain; Thomson-Houston in France; Siemens and Telefunken in
Germany; Philips in Holland; and many others. History is repeating
itself now in minicomputers and personal computers: it will be many
years before the industry worldwide moves into the black. And the
same thing is happening in biotechnology. This was also the pattern a
hundred years ago in the electrical apparatus industry of the 1880s, for
instance, or in the automobile industry of 1900 or 1910.
And during this long gestation period, non-high-tech ventures
have to produce the profits to offset the losses of high tech and pro-
vide the needed capital.
The French are right, of course: economic and political strength
these days requires a high-tech position, whether in information tech-
nology, in biology, or in automation. The French surely have the sci-
entific and technical capacity. And yet it is most unlikely (I am tempt-
ed to say impossible) for any country to be innovative and entrepre-
neurial in high tech without having an entrepreneurial economy. High
tech is indeed the leading edge, but there cannot be an edge without
a knife. There cannot be a viable high-tech sector by itself any more
than there can be a healthy brain in a dead body. There must be an
economy full of innovators and entrepreneurs, with entrepreneurial
vision and entrepreneurial values, with access to venture capital, and
filled with entrepreneurial vigor.

III

THE SOCIAL INNOVATIONS NEEDED

There are two areas in which an entrepreneurial society requires
substantial social innovation.
1. The first is a policy to take care of redundant workers. The num-
bers are not large. But blue-collar workers in “smokestack industries”
are concentrated in a very few places; three-quarters of all American