Innovator-Entrepreneurs: The Passionate, Compassionate, and Grumpy
When Looking for Innovators, I Stumbled Onto Entrepreneurs
Abstract
In a global study of world-class, cross-domain innovators, I found 90% of them were also entrepreneur/intrapreneurs. Their origin stories are briefly outlined, and a framework is presented of their journey genesis and underlying motivations. Although classical entrepreneurship theory posits rational motivations for entrepreneurship (market opportunity, profits, etc.), these entrepreneurs were motivated primarily by creative passion, compassion for others, and grumpy dissatisfaction as consumers. I present themes and threads from their collective experience, as well as the need to better support future generations like them, both within and outside corporations. I propose some thought-provoking questions to aid in the search for new entrepreneurial ideas, based on this framework of entrepreneurial motivations. In this age of disruption and robotic displacement, we need entrepreneurs, and I propose that they will be different from industrial-age rational-man. With the desire for better tools and support, we should begin by understanding those who’ve done well and what we can learn from them.
Note: Since the article was originally intended for a research/academic audience, pseudonyms are used, in keeping with common practice for the particular social science genre.
Innovator-Entrepreneurs: The Passionate, Compassionate, and Grumpy
I was researching innovation and stumbled over entrepreneurship. The study began with my conviction that we are in the early days of a renaissance of innovation, fueled by IT, communications, and globalization (Fonseca, 2014; Guillebeau, 2012). As we’ve seen in past eras of creative productivity, extremely fertile ground for high-value/high-impact advances lies in the spaces between domains of industry, country, technology, social class, fields, functions, and more (Johansson, 2006). To explore these areas and create ground-breaking advances, we need to know how to create across domains and bring these useful creations to the world.
So, I conducted a global research study of 30 cross-domain innovators in the arts, business, startups, science and technology, inventing, social activism, and education. My aim was to discover why and how these individuals create across domains and why others in the same circumstance don’t.
As it turns out, 90% of them were not only innovators but also entrepreneurs. They founded organizations big and small, outside corporations (“entrepreneurs”) and within (“intrapreneurs”), created ventures for profit as well as not-for-profit or both (social entrepreneurship), became pillars of new fields, and had a variety of reasons for doing so. Although many traditional entrepreneurship studies do not include intrapreneurs, not-for-profit founders, and social entrepreneurs, mine does, and “entrepreneurs” as used in this article denotes all such founders. Some founded multiple types of organizations. Their interviews did not reveal sweeping differences in their motivations or journeys based on the types of organization founded, so I have drawn insights from them collectively.
Here I outline their motivations and present a simple framework for understanding their journey geneses at a deeper level. In some sense, this is an accidental discovery. Indeed, sometimes the unexpected is the most compelling research finding.
An in-depth literature review of entrepreneurship old and new has been presented by Cardon, Wincent, Singh, and Drnovsek, (2009). That said, I will briefly mention here our collective vision of industrial-age entrepreneurship: capital-intensive venturers with a market in mind and a new technology or idea that should give a good payback, with proper analysis, execution, and risk management. In this new era of disruptive innovation, we see people creating new ventures in new ways: smaller, enabled by cheap and pervasive global information and communications technologies, fast-scaling, both higher- and lower-tech, and sometimes without a particular market in mind, or creating markets as they grow (Guillebeau, 2012).
At first, these innovators and entrepreneurs may serve their own need or curiosity, but then they realize others might need the solution, as well — maybe a few, maybe millions. This highlights the importance not only of the traditional diverge-converge process in creativity (exploring many options, then converging on one, to produce a high-quality, creative solution); but also the importance of converge-diverge — to converge on a solution and then bring it to others — a process driven by a variety of motivations (Shah & Tripsas, 2012) and the essence of entrepreneurship.
I won’t be presenting the entire entrepreneurial journey of these 30 innovators or outlining types of entrepreneurs (Abraham, 2011) — just the origins of their new ventures and motivation for their journeys. Similarly, I won’t be presenting an analysis of the social and cultural climate that promoted the innovations, important though they are in promoting innovation and entrepreneurship (Nussbaum, 2013). In order to tease out differences beyond circumstance and focus on the individual, my interviews include both innovator-entrepreneurs and those in the same circumstances who did not innovate.
Now that more people than ever before can be global entrepreneurs with scalable impact (Guillebeau, 2012), it is more important than ever that we should inspire, enable, and guide them by understanding and presenting those who have done it well. Perhaps with this understanding of how good ideas originate and ventures begin, along with a measure of inspiration from others’ success, more of us can do the same.
Sample and Research Design
Taking a grounded-theory approach, all of the 30 innovator interviews were in-person, and the first 10 (exploratory phase) included shadowing them for a day or part of a day (some much more). The latter 20 (validation phase) were in-person interviews only (without shadowing). Third-party information was gathered on all 30, including articles written by and about them, their TED talks and other videos, company websites, etc. Two or more colleagues, friends, and family members were interviewed about them and their creative journeys, as well (3 or more in the exploratory phase), resulting in over 100 interviews. This was followed by transcription, coding, re-coding, profiling, writing, and feedback by participants and others.
Findings
Overall
The innovator-entrepreneurs are shown below in roughly four categories, along two dimensions — the genesis of their venture (self or others), and the clarity of outcome, perceived at the outset. Their names have been changed to pseudonyms (“Autech”, “Citifarm”, etc.) to maintain their anonymity (although some are relatively public figures). These categories are more fully discussed in the following sections. The three innovators who are not entrepreneurs are shown as “Nontrepreneurs.”
The origin-stories of these entrepreneurs are both summarised in Table 1 and described in the following sections. Although not specifically addressed in this paper, their geographies are included (origin, location of their homes and countries they have lived in for more than 6 months), to display the geographic breadth of their lives (another surprising finding) and suggest that insights drawn from this group may be applicable worldwide.
The Disenchanted
Three participants (Fastfud, Missiontech, and Lastmile) fit the more traditional view of entrepreneurship, in which they saw opportunities, mapped out the potential market, value to be created, risks, and journey forward, then launched and grew their enterprises. Their journeys were not conducted according to an exact plan (none are), but the journeys were begun with a fairly clear idea of the value to be created and the business to be built.
I call them “The Disenchanted” because their entrepreneurial vision grew from disenchantment with the way things are — either because they saw a problem not currently addressed well or because they saw a way to make things better, e.g. by enacting the now-possible with new technologies, products, or practices not yet employed.
All three saw a way to do better, but their ventures were not launched out of their own dissatisfaction as customers. We now turn to these dissatisfied customer-entrepreneurs.
The Dissatisfied
Richard Branson started Virgin Airlines because he was a dissatisfied passenger (Clarkson, 2014). Colin Barceloux (BookRenter, n.d.) was unhappy with the high cost of textbooks and founded bookrenter.com, which now rents books to 1.5 million customers. Eric Betzing couldn’t get his microscope to do what he wanted to do, so with Harald Hess from Bell Labs created the PALM microscope (photoactivated localization microscopy) in Harald’s living room. Eric was later awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry jointly with Stefan Hell and William Moerner (Betzig, 2014).
As Nussbaum notes, “Today’s most creative entrepreneurs … don’t focus on ‘unmet needs’ when it comes to developing new ideas; they use their own experiences and aspirations as a starting point for dreaming up new companies and technologies” (Nussbaum 2013, p. 33). Von Hippel (1988) highlighted users as innovators (e.g. for scientific instruments) but noted that such innovations were normally passed on to manufacturers instead of self-launched. However, according to Shah and Tripsas (2007), that practice has given way to the rise of user-entrepreneurship, especially among “professional users” who then leave their employers to launch new enterprises — or remain and launch, as with Dr. Samuel Gan in the current study.
Drilling down to end-user consumers, McLuhan and Nevitt (1972) posited that technology would enable consumers to become producers and described the journey of “accidental” entrepreneurs who were dissatisfied, improvised a solution, and then offered it to others. Market entry would begin “under the radar” of traditional firms (Haefliger, Jager, & Krogh, 2010). Indeed, Toffler (1980) coined the term “prosumer” to denote the blurring of producers and consumers and predicted the rise of the prosumer. His book The Third Wave is the number two best-selling book of all time in China (just behind one of the works of Mao Zedong), and China hosts one of the world’s finest examples of customer innovation and design. The Xiaomi mobile phone company is hyper-responsive to customer feedback and insights and invites customers to co-create and improve fast-released imperfect products, instead of holding products in R&D until they are considered perfect enough to launch (McKinsey Global Institute, 2015).
Indeed, open innovation by big corporations with startups and consumers alike is gaining popularity and has a strong history of success. The mountain bike, for example, was an invention of bike users (not company R&D labs), which was later adopted by bike manufacturers. Years later, mountain bikes and equipment grew into a $58-billion dollar market — 65% of bike sales in the US (Leadbeater, 2005).
Eight of the innovators I studied had similar motivations — dissatisfaction as consumers. I call them “The Dissatisfied” (or “grumpy”). Autech’s son has autism, which was diagnosed (as all currently are) after age 4 or 5, when crucial years of early-childhood brain-development are already complete. He investigated whether there might be some way to diagnose earlier and developed a device that can diagnose autism in newborns, by taking a reading from the cochlear region of the inner ear. Autism spectrum disorders are now diagnosed in 1 out of every 68 people in America (Christensen et al., 2016) and a 90% success rate has been reported on ingraining social skills with interventions before the age of 2 years (MacDonald, Parry-Cruwys, Dupere, & Ahearn, 2014). Further, with an objective way to map autistic brain activity, toxicity and other intervention studies may now have the tool they need for measuring which interventions are effective and which are not.
Citifarm’s children and students were not given fresh food in their school — brain fuel for effective learning. She was frustrated that:
“…food gets sent from faraway places to the school frozen…. One of the warming ovens had broken, so for 3 weeks running, the kids were getting cheese sandwiches for breakfast and lunch…. the students weren’t eating the food because it tasted so horrible.… and they were getting headaches” …(Citifarm, 2016)
Citifarm was motivated to start up an institute for urban farming, an early inititative in what may become a $70 billion market worldwide. After having been a lone entrepreneur without a support ecosystem (which she desperately wanted), Startupcom brought a franchise-model startup ecosystem business to Singapore. Mobiledna was frustrated trying to respond to a DNA research question while traveling, so he created an app to perform DNA analysis on the mobile phone. This effectively sets scientists free from their labs to perform analysis in the field, where they can quickly collect more data when analysis generates new questions. More apps and sales followed, as well as a new bioinformatics journal.
Pigalert — farmer, inventor, and entrepreneur with a passion for medicine — remembers well carrying buckets of dead pigs out of the pig-house when he was a child. Sows — now ever-larger and with even more offspring per litter — roll over on them and don’t realize they are suffocating their piglets. In response to an innovation challenge at school, Pigalert developed something useful at his own family farm — a device that distinguishes suffocation squeals from feeding squeals and vibrates around the mother’s waist, spurring her to rise and save her piglet’s life. He is growing his new company to serve farms all over the world and estimates potential global agricultural savings to be $8 billion.
Quickstamp, the inventor, created his most popular patent for something he was dissatisfied with as a consumer. He didn’t want to order and then return another day to pick up an expensive and tediously hand-made self-inking rubber stamp. So, he talked the provider into letting him visit the back room to see how the thing was made. After nosing around, asking lots of questions, and building several prototypes, Quickstamp created a new machine to produce custom stamps in an hour. His machine is now sold world-wide and takes over the stamp market wherever introduced.
The final two innovators in this category pursued physically-active careers — one, a sportsman, one a dance professional. When Happitech could no longer compete as a national squash champion, he faced a life devoid of joy and meaning. In his search for his own happiness, he learned about positive psychology and the science of happiness and became a leader in the field. He created not only a tech-enabled consulting firm to increase happiness in companies, but also a not-for-profit organization for teaching happiness in school systems. In fact, the course he developed as a university faculty member was the most popular in his school’s 350+-year history. It began with his own search for happiness.
Finally, Dancexec, a dancer and dance teacher, encountered something unexpected for someone who brings joy to others — burnout. She researched the impact of emotive-labour jobs and became a pillar of the resilience movement, developing tools, techniques, a consulting company, television and radio shows, and educational programs for thousands of professionals and business leaders, who themselves impact many thousands more.
All of these dissatisfied people (some more grumpy than others) did something special. Not only did they take action to address their problems, but they also extended their solutions to others. Some dissatisfaction emerged while acting as consumers, some as producers, and some outside consumption markets altogether, highlighting the importance of consumer-led market development, not just firm-led (Martin & Schouten, 2014). Some solutions have specialized impact (e.g. mobile-phone DNA analysis), and some have broad-reaching or high-dollar impact (e.g. autism testing for every newborn or $8 billion in global agriculture savings). All are remarkable innovations that have helped themselves and others.
The Passionate
The next group — and the largest — launched their entrepreneurial journeys with passion — something intriguing, something they loved, something that inspired them or brought them joy. In the words of Cardon et al. (2009, p. 515), this group experienced, “…intense emotion that stirs humans with energy and deep longing to make a difference.”
Unlike “The Disenchanted,” the outcome of their journey was highly uncertain and could come to life quickly, slowly, in a completely new direction, or not at all. Although various sources of innovation can be explained by economics (von Hippel, 1988), not all innovations are motivated by economics. These are the dreamers — but also doers who have made their dreams real and brought them to the world. Unlike “The Dissatisfied,” they didn’t begin their journey by solving a personal problem of dissatisfaction. Their journeys began by following an inspiration, dream, or desire.
“I was sitting at my office looking through the glass down on the floor below mezzanine level…to 200 chemists, physicists and technicians that were working, and that was when I had an epiphany. I saw interaction patterns which had nothing to do with work. They were connected in these really interesting patterns, and I’d seen these patterns before.… then I saw it again and I thought ‘Oh my gosh!’ … I kept looking and looking and seeing the pattern again and again.… I couldn’t get it out of my mind. It kept bothering me and bothering me and bothering me.” (Peoplemap, 2016)
Peoplemap, trained in art and quantum chemistry, saw people one day moving in a quantum-chemical pattern. She was completely captivated and returned to school to study the phenomenon, drawing on anthropology, ethnology, mathematical modelling, software development, and more. She created tools to map and analyse social systems and was told by her professor it would never amount to anything. She started a company anyway for social network analysis and consulting, and 35 years later, she is still working there. The firm was later called by CIO Magazine one of the 100 most innovative firms in the world. It began with something she saw that intrigued and compelled her.
Indepfin grew distrustful of the way his industry — wealth management — worked. Financial advisors sold financial products to clients and received their pay through the instruments they sold — a clear conflict of interest. Indepfin, with three co-founders, launched a financial advisory firm with a new model of engagement — independent, fee-based advice. He was disenchanted with the way things were, but unlike “The Disenchanted,” above, there was no market for such a service or immediate opportunity that looked like a profitable new business. Indeed, their firm faced extreme difficulty surviving while building their client base. Convincing clients theirs was a better way was an uphill battle. However, they were passionate about the rightness of their approach, and today, their company is their country’s largest independent financial advisory firm (others followed their lead), with over USD 15 billion under management.
Mobiletech was a product developer at a large mobile-phone provider, searching for new ways to use new mobile technologies to create new product and service ventures within his company. He orchestrated the first contract between a music company and a mobile phone company — the first digital music deal — which later became part of the ringtones market that grew to $2 billion in 2011. Another venture he created for his firm provided information services to the poor, which grew to 125 million subscribers. He didn’t care about receiving entrepreneurial-type compensation from the new ventures he started and grew. He was always excited (and motivated) by being first with a new innovation, which provided identity, meaning, and importance for him personally (Cardon et al. 2009).
Ideaspeak combined and transformed political science ideas from his doctoral studies at well-known institutions in the UK and USA. He has integrated new technologies, economics, and political science and brought his new ideas out of academe into corporations and governments. He didn’t train for the job and then apply to a company supplying it. He bathed in new ideas without knowing at the beginning of his journey how to commercialize them. Later, he found ways to combine, advance, and activate them. Having become a best-selling author and founded two consulting firms to do so, he was named one of Esquire’s “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century.” It all began with his fascination with new ideas and how to integrate and actualize them.
Multi-Emmy-award-winning executive producer Omnimedia and entrepreneurs Dotcom and Emarket all had something in common: early internet plays. They knew there were new economics and new possibilities in technology-enabled offerings, but faced the same 90% failure rate of other internet startups (Silver, n.d.). Their journeys began with passion and possibility, but not as much clarity as traditional entrepreneurs are thought to prefer (certainly not as much as funders prefer). Both founding team members in different firms, Omnimedia’s and Dotcom’s early companies grew for a while but are not around any longer. However, another of Dotcom’s founding-team companies sold for $855million. Emarket’s internet marketing firm was sold privately for an undisclosed amount.
Sportsci is part of the startup scene, as well, but from a different perspective. His fascination with sports and science, including biochemistry, math, and physics, led to his current work with his nation’s Olympic team and a mathematical-modeling approach that helped one of their athletes earn his event’s highest score in Olympic history. Realising that advances made for the Olympic teams can be developed into products for everyone, he established a sports incubator. The products and ventures that emerge from the incubator are not initiated by finding holes in the sports market and developing products and business plans. They begin, instead, with particular problems and desires of star athletes, scientific curiosity for what doesn’t make sense, and an intense desire to think differently and try something new.
Photoman started out as a shy teen who discovered that with a camera in his hand, he could interact with people easily and far more broadly than any other teen he knew. From the science club to the cheerleaders to the football stars to more, everyone wanted him to come to their events and photograph them for the school paper, friends, and family. He passionately wanted to be a photographer (and nothing else) and announced to his dad that he would work for the top two photographic journals in the world. Through a combination of passion, talent, humility, and happily taking assignments other photographers wouldn’t touch, he has done just that and far more. He started a hugely-successful crowd-photographed book series; photographed kings, presidents, and leaders of our age; and founded a media company described by Forbes as “One of the 25 Coolest Companies in America.” ‘All from a shy teen with a dream and no entrepreneurial roadmap.
Chefsci was another troubled teen — a 13-year-old school dropout who needed money and stepped into a fancy restaurant to ask if he could wash dishes for pay. Coming from a difficult background, he could weather the high-stress conditions in a brigade kitchen and, thriving in the strict and demanding environment, soon found a passion for food and became a culinary protégé. After years of working with some of the world’s greatest chefs in some of the world’s most famous restaurants, volunteering on his days off to work and learn, immersing himself day and night not only in the current practice of gourmet but also in related scientific disciplines, Chefsci became an innovator in the science of gourmet. This resulted not only in healthier, eye-poppingly creative food and drink, but also a calmer, scientifically-managed kitchen with a loyal, happy staff (hard to find in gourmet circles). His award-winning, Michelin-star restaurants have launched him into the global spotlight, and his most recently-founded venture was named by Miele Guide as one of Asia’s Top 20 Restaurants. In his case, no MBA, no bachelor’s, no high school diploma + love of learning, passion, hard work = world-class entrepreneur.
The Compassionate
“Leaders serve. They serve before they’re served. And they bring about a culture where we can serve one another.” (Socent, 2016)
Unlike “The Dissatisfied,” who solve their own problem then extend the solution to others, “The Compassionate” solve problems for others, then extend to others. Like “The Passionate,” they feel compelled to create something, and they face great uncertainty, but their passions are less focused on new ideas, technologies, products, or creations. They are focused instead on serving those in need and making the world better. They are mavericks who dream, disrupt, and navigate the unknown (Kerryn & Silber, 2016) for the benefit of others.
Edkids, for example, opened her school doors (without asking permission) to poor children who had no safe place to sleep at night. She eventually offered them food and education, as well.
“What’s she like? I’ve … seen very few persons like her. She has such a huge heart and compassion. These are the two words that I always talk about [Edkids] — big-hearted. Sometimes being a heart person makes things difficult. But for me, [Edkids] is heart and compassion.… she knew each and everybody. Just have to give her a little clue — she knows… and she will give you what happened to her maybe 5 years ago when she came here.… handling 40 kids in my class, sometimes I find that I don’t know much about this child. How she remembers for 1,600?” (Teacher, Edkids’ School, 2015).
While running her well-regarded school in India, Edkids began programs to extend her school beyond the 800 students registered when she took over as principal. Need after need, new program after new program, after 35 years, the initiatives she and her staff built were collected into a new NGO. By then, they had improved the lives of 450,000 people, by providing education, shelter and food for homeless students, the “barefoot teacher” program for slums, domestic child labour advocacy, and more. She never had all the resources or a plan when she started a program. She saw a need, gathered who and what were available, launched, and had faith that the rest would be provided along the way. And it always was.
Socent, Chief Dream Igniter (and CEO) of a nation-wide charitable organization and co-founder of a leading social enterprise, could easily have pursued a career managing and growing any of the businesses in her family’s $5+ billion portfolio. However, with an entrepreneurial flair like her grandfather, who founded a large, international electronics firm, and who encouraged her in social entrepreneurship, Socent creates and co-creates economically-viable programmes and enterprises that create social value — not just business value. Indeed, she evangelises for businesspeople to grow and harvest the social value that can arise out of what their businesses already do — and stop bad practices that harm, for example, migrant workers. Like any entrepreneur, she has an eye for value, what can be created, and who needs to be included in a new venture, tapping into the motivations of various stakeholders. But she isn’t just looking at value within the economic system. She extends her entrepreneurial vision to the social system, as well.
Like Chefsci, Needybiz did not follow an academic path to success. He failed his “A” and “O” levels and took a job in the building industry. However, it wasn’t long before he could see value and opportunity by thinking differently and doing differently — which had earned him many punishments at school. After founding 16 companies, he devoted himself to social entrepreneurship and has championed the sanitation cause — crusading to provide toilets to the 2.6 billion people in the world without them. He also founded an accelerator for other social entrepreneurs who would like to build businesses and marketplaces for — and with — the 4 billion people at the bottom of the world’s economic pyramid. Most of us think of accelerators that produce Silicon-Valley unicorns. Not Needybiz. Thinking and acting differently got him into trouble in school but turned out well, after all. He thrives on changing the world and helping those in need.
The final three compassionate entrepreneurs founded ventures in healthcare. Warmshot co-founded a firm to bring non-refrigerated vaccines to millions of people worldwide outside the cold-distribution chain. His United-Nations-funded Cambodian project was not flourishing, and he searched for an opportunity that would leverage what he had already been doing, as well as the humanitarian motivations he brought to his work. Medacc co-founded a med-tech accelerator and has launched an over-clothing portable-mammography venture that could save millions of lives. He scans opportunities out of curiosity and interest, but pursues the ones he believes will be winners and impact people’s lives. A participant in a business program who was coached by Medacc had this to say of him: “…unselfish. You know, this is in the context of Asia-specific environment. It’s not so common to share valuable business ideas so easily. I guess they know that the team will one day be their competitor. So in the case of Medacc, he’s completely unfettered in this aspect…In a sense, he’ll tell you everything he knows that’s of value and will not hold anything back that’s of value to you.”
Daylab is working with Medacc to bring an integrated bacterial and fungal test to hospitals worldwide to save millions of lives and $2 billion in medical savings each year by prescribing the right medicine within 24 hours, instead of a cocktail of expensive antibiotics that may save the patient or may not, while waiting for currently-standard sequential testing. He was initially invited by his nation’s government to take on the project, but only with the passion to save lives could he and his team have persisted with a task widely thought to be impossible.
The genesis and sustaining energy for these entrepreneurs is compassion and impact on lives in need. Sometimes, they don’t use traditional tools of entrepreneurship (as with Edkids), or they may use them to scale and attract funding after their initial humanistic vision and drive (as with Warmshot’s firm, which started in a classroom, moved to a university innovation lab, and then raised more formal venture funding). Without the compassionate phase, these initatives would never see the scaling phase.
Discussion
What does each group tell us overall? The more-traditional “Disenchanted” group began their journeys by recognising (and evaluating) an unmet or poorly-met need they saw or an opportunity to do things better (e.g. via new information and communication infrastructures or new methods brought to another market).
“The Dissatisfied” were dissatisfied in three areas:
· as consumers, e.g. with the lack of fresh food, slow consumer goods production, and late medical diagnosis,
· as producers, e.g. frustration with tools, or an innovation challenge at school applied to a sad duty in the family business, and
· in “life” (outside a formal marketplace), e.g. search for happiness, understanding burnout, or need for a support system.
Individuals and the companies that serve and employ them need to recognize that this is a powerful catalyst for innovation and growth. Yes, they should converge on a solution for the problem at hand, but to capitalize on the real value of what was created requires that we then diverge, offering the solution to others in need. Hamel (n.d.) wrote, “empathy is the engine of innovation,” (p. 4), and sharing our solutions is, at heart, an empathetic step beyond our own problem-solving. Enabled by the internet (i.e. not possible in the industrial age), self-made solutions can now become cheaply-launched global businesses with the potential to go viral and make everyone’s life better.
Similarly, “The Passionate” had three basic areas of passion:
· “head” (intellectual), e.g. intriguing & compelling observation; scientific curiosity / problem-solving; combining, advancing, & activating new ideas or technologies,
· “heart” (emotional), e.g. love of the craft/artistry, pride in “being first” with a new innovation and
· “hands” (active), e.g. mission to create a fair/just system.
As above, it is easier now than ever before to pursue what inspires us, share/offer what we create, and if people want the innovation (useful acceptance turns creativity into an innovation), scale up. However, the passion of the innovator is absolutely essential to its success, and we need to incorporate these early activities somehow into our investment equations and corporate (and market) systems.
“The Compassionate” had two basic motivations and can be contrasted with the “traditional” entrepreneur (“The Disenchanted”):
· serving those in need (in contrast to serving an unmet or poorly-met need), e.g. poor children, migrant workers, and those without basic infrastructures and
· making the world better (in contrast to doing things better), e.g. saving lives with vaccines for the poor, comfortable and accessible cancer screening, and life-saving diagnosis.
Edkids’ advice for other social entrepreneurs is to “just start” — even without all the resources and answers and plans. If people want it, it will grow, they will contribute, and resources will come as people get to know about it. Many social entrepreneurs have to become comfortable and faithful with that level of uncertainty. Corporations normally are not, and they actively weed out such risky initiatives, although to a lesser degree if they are part of CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) departments. Knowing they can at least gain marketing exposure and align themselves with a cause can sustain the initiative. It is also helpful — for both individuals and corporations — to look further, as Socent does, for business-societal alignment and all the value created at the intersection, not just the easy-to-measure economics.
Perhaps the most surprising insight these entrepreneurs reveal is not that entrepreneurship can come from “non-traditional” sources, but that so few of these entrepreneurs came in the “conventional” form — rational businesspeople spotting an opportunity and taking the classically-understood steps to scope the value, assess the risk, and plan the development. The overwhelming majority here — chosen because of their “game-changing” (cross-domain) approach to innovation — came from dissatisfaction, passion, and compassion.
Some did come from traditional entrepreneurial backgrounds but then moved into other quadrants (e.g. Needybiz, who moved from the “Disenchantment” space into the “Compassion” space). In the industrial age, professionals were taught to train for a job, do it, and retire. However, a new model may become the norm: do multiple things in multiple spaces — at once or at different times — like the following entrepreneurs in this study:
· Autech (one of “The Dissatisfied”), who developed an autism detection device while working as a chemical engineer.
· Emarket (one of “The Passionate”), who developed the largest biofuel producer in his nation then grew and sold an internet marketing firm.
· Socent (one of “The Compassionate”), who has worked in profit-making business, not-for-profit, and encourages the two to integrate for synergy.
Beyond shifting quadrants by starting multiple enterprises, it is also possible to span multiple quadrants by having multiple motivations for creating a new enterprise (e.g. Citifarm, who wanted to help her own children, show compassion for other children, and harness her passion for fresh nutrition and community-based job development in underprivileged areas). In the same way that combining multiple types of innovation improves the chance for success (Keeley, Pikkel, Quinn, & Walters, 2013), perhaps combining multiple motivations can increase the chance for success by better sustaining the entrepreneur and his or her team through a normally-difficult journey.
Interestingly, about half did not have a business background or training. They came from medicine, art, engineering, sports, science, quasi-government, and religion. Perhaps a jarring note to management educators is that these entrepreneurs primarily are not MBA’s or otherwise educated in similar disciplines at similar levels. Their formal education ranges from 13-year-old school dropout through doctorate and beyond.
Despite their variety of educational backgrounds and strikingly global backgrounds (good for opening the mind and getting used to crossing boundaries), these entrepreneurs do show another striking similarity: 20 out of 27 (74%) of them founded multiple ventures. It may be that once they make an impactful change, they grow a passion to do it again. Few of them had lifelong dreams of entrepreneurship or mentioned coming from business families. Nonetheless, most of them grew what is perhaps another passion we should add to the list: a passion for entrepreneurship itself.
Conclusion
In this internet-enabled age of disruption and new market creation, more people than ever before can bring their innovations to the world. There is much value to be created across domains, and similar to the innovators in this study, a new breed of entrepreneur will likely be driven more by dissatisfaction, passion, and compassion than mere economic rationality. Indeed, a change in the underlying character and motivation of tomorrow’s entrepreneur was proposed by Price as new “frames of thinking,” including change (renaissance not revolution), fulfilment (passion not possession), freedom (vocation not vacation), meaning (purpose not pointless), community (co-operation not competition), and legacy (extraordinary not ordinary) (Fonseca, 2014). Change, fulfilment/passion, and freedom are included in Figure 2 above, and meaning, community, and legacy were all discussed in one form or another by multiple entrepreneurs in the current study.
Further, new enterprises like these begin with experimentation and extrapolation, not traditional, industrial-age, MBA-style planning. Once we understand, use, and manage the motivations of these world-builders, we will then need to provide them with better early-venture business development tools and support. Since we may see a rise in social entrepreneurship (Krige & Siber, 2016), intrapreneurship, and other businesses beyond the industrial-age for-profit venture, we should see more studies that include different types of ventures, either to tease out differences, or (as this study has done) to produce findings relevant for all.
Industrial-age corporations traditionally do not support many of the motivations above or the often-disruptive innovations they produce (Christensen, 2013). In the face of disruption, however, corporations say they want entrepreneurs (intrapreneurs) and initiatives that will help them survive disruption, including development of their own disruptive initiatives. However, they cannot rely on traditional corporate approaches based on the rational-man model of entrepreneurship (Christensen, 2013).
They need to tap into people’s dissatisfaction, passion, and compassion. They need employees and customers to “bring their hearts to work” (Hamel, n.d.) and engage in activities that will produce generative, disruptive ideas. Like the innovators in this study, the world’s top innovator-entrepreneurs distinguish themselves by not-traditionally-corporate activities: associating the seemingly-unrelated (connecting silos), questioning the status quo, keenly observing (not just head-down-pencil-up), actively experimenting (rather than perfecting the routine), and networking diversely (Dyer, Gregersen, & Christensen, 2009). Outside the corporate world, the private equity community is skewed (albeit understandably) towards scaling later-stage, proven ventures — not swimming upstream to foster and grow new (risky) ones.
In an age where 47% of human jobs are anticipated to be replaced by computerisation (Frey & Osborne, 2013), almost half of us will need to create our own and others’ work (via entrepreneurship), and companies will need to tap more effectively into their remaining human workforce. We will all need to move beyond recognizing passion as important in entrepreneurship towards identifying “passion for what” (Cardon et al., 2009) and generating it. Perhaps one place to begin is to tap into the motivations above, asking questions like the following:
Opportunities need not only to be identified but also matched with entrepreneurs who can take them forward. Not all entrepreneurs are alike. Some are more naturally inventors/opportunists, and some are more comfortable as founders, analytical specialists, or developers/scalers (Cardon et al., 2009; Abraham, 2011). A variety of problem-solving styles is necessary to bring creations to life, covering ideation and evaluation as well as well as experiencing and thinking (Basadur, 1995). Lone entrepreneurs who can span all styles may be able to lead throughout their journeys (e.g. Fastfud), but many (or most) of us will need to gather partners (like Autech) — whole-brained teams to launch, grow, and manage creative abrasion (Leonard & Straus, 1997).
It is entirely possible that my sample is skewed towards this particular new breed of entrepreneur because I focus on cross-domain, world-leading innovation, and that’s where many new big wins are. Nonetheless, I look forward to further studies of entrepreneurs and ways to help them begin their journeys. I look forward to researchers who investigate this and who, themselves, bring their hearts (and dissatisfaction and passion and compassion) to work.
Acknowledgements
I thank my ever-patient research assistant, Dr. Lee Poh Chin, for her continually wise and insightful contribution to this research, as well as her dedicated efforts to clean up most of my writing messes. I also thank Mr. Shareff Uthuman for managing the rats-nest of global research travel and budgets. They are both God-sends.
Funding
The research described here, as well as writing and publication, was fully supported by S P Jain School of Global Management.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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fusioneer
ˈfjuːʒ(ə)nɪə/
noun
1. one who innovates across domains of industry, field, country, social class, etc.
◦ s radical innovator, interdisciplinary creator, T-shaped person, borderless freethinker, boundary-crossing integrator, oddball;
