Entrepreneurial Density
Summary:
Start with a strong culture that people can accept or reject based on DIY ethics.
Entrepreneurial density (ED) is a measurement of your effort in developing entrepreneurial ecosystems. The higher the density, the greater the ecosystem and the more ambitious the projects. However, just understanding the measurement is unlikely to produce greater returns on effort.
On the other hand, understanding the job of an entrepreneur will help develop an environment that provides adequate support to fulfill your goals of improving ED. My definition of an entrepreneur is a person who is able to produce unlikely solutions to known problems. The problems have to be known and the greater the market of sufferers, the greater the demand for a product. However, the solution has to be unlikely, as the greater a problem there is, the more people will be solving the issue.
For example, we always had a problem connecting with people with phrases such as “lost love” and “out of sight, out of mind”. Facebook, however, filled the problem with their solution which was unlikely to have worked but they started with a niche audience (college students) with a specific set of solution constraints which they generalized to a wider audience.
Now how do you build an environment where people search for unlikely solutions instead of obvious implementations, which is what most startups do to mitigate technical risk? In other words, create a culture that’s orthogonal to the one NJ has and the way to embrace that culture is to seed it with the 10 craziest people you know and give them what they need to become successful. Use those case studies to then market it to others and show them how you’re committed to the Think Different crowd.
This strategy is difficult to execute due to the fact that the initial base of people are volatile and incapable of remaining in an environment non-conducive to their “change shit, break shit” attitude. In essence, you have to create a movement that is capable of growth but is inherently unstable so will be short lived. Think of it as a cultural forest fire that needs to destroy the current thinking and replace it with something new in its wake. Though tapping into existing efforts reduces the time to change, but doesn’t reduce the effort burden.
Look at these movements and the corresponding affect on their respective communities:
- Hippie Movement => What it did for Palo Alto & SF
- Punk Movement => How it influenced DIY Culture
- Hipster Movement => What it’s doing in Brooklyn
- Hiphop Movement => The way the members think about work & business
Broader understanding:
All these movements are started as ideologies so they root themselves in culture (attitude accepted by a group of people), politics (behavior carried out by a group of people) or religion (irrational belief that’s accepted by a group of people). Then they start to influence fashion (self-expression via appearances), media (captured self-expression that’s transmitted to an audience), and finally business (self-sustainable self-expression).
I would start with a divergent culture that’s concerned with socioeconomics (politics) and believes that anyone is capable of global change (religion). From this core tenant, you’ll see people expressing themselves in a variety of ways which will be dominated by a concern for DIY & self-sustainability i.e. business. Given there’s existing cultures to base your efforts, I’d start to see how you can expand the efforts instead of initiating a new one.
Some new cultures to look at:
