Book Summary : Innovation and Entrepreneurship By Peter Drucker

The most highlighted quotes from Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker

1. They create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.

2. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.

3. Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service.

4. Entrepreneurs, by definition, shift resources from areas of low productivity and yield to areas of higher productivity and yield.

5. “Innovation,” then, is an economic or social rather than a technical term. It can be defined the way J. B. Say defined entrepreneurship, as changing the yield of resources. Or, as a modern economist would tend to do, it can be defined in demand terms rather than in supply terms, that is, as changing the value and satisfaction obtained from resources by the consumer.

6. Entrepreneurship is “risky” mainly because so few of the so-called entrepreneurs know what they are doing.

7. The unexpected failure demands that you go out, look around, and listen. Failure should always be considered a symptom of an innovative opportunity, and taken seriously as such.

8. Managements must look at every unexpected success with the questions: (1) What would it mean to us if we exploited it? (2) Where could it lead us? (3) What would we have to do to convert it into an opportunity? And (4) How do we go about it? This means, first, that managements need to set aside specific time in which to discuss unexpected successes; and second, that someone should always be designated to analyze an unexpected success and to think through how it could be exploited.

9. Entrepreneurship, then, is behavior rather than personality trait. And its foundation lies in concept and theory rather than in intuition.

10. He postulated that dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating entrepreneur, rather than equilibrium and optimization, is the “norm” of a healthy economy and the central reality for economic theory and economic practice.

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