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Systematic Entrepreneurship 29

one hundred new businesses or new major product lines in the last sixty
years, has been successful four out of every five times in its ventures.
This is only a small sample of the entrepreneurs who somehow innovate
at low risk. Surely there are far too many of them for low-risk entrepre-
neurship to be a fluke, a special dispensation of the gods, an accident, or
mere chance.
There are also enough individual entrepreneurs around whose bat-
ting average in starting new ventures is so high as to disprove the pop-
ular belief of the high risk of entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called
entrepreneurs know what they are doing. They lack the methodology.
They violate elementary and well-known rules. This is particularly
true of high-tech entrepreneurs. To be sure (as will be discussed in
Chapter 9), high-tech entrepreneurship and innovation are intrinsical-
ly more difficult and more risky than innovation based on economics
and market structure, on demographics, or even on something as
seemingly nebulous and intangible as Weltanschauung—perceptions
and moods. But even high-tech entrepreneurship need not be “high-
risk,” as Bell Lab and IBM prove. It does need, however, to be sys-
tematic. It needs to be managed. Above all, it needs to be based on
purposeful innovation.