The Economist’s special report on entrepreneurship is well worth a read. Some highlights:
- entrepreneurialism needs to be rethought: in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation
- the report uses (entrepreneur) to mean somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem
- its not all youthful techies – Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to start Garmin
- average entrepreneur was 39 when he or she started (their business) The number of founders over 50 was twice as large as that under 25.
- why have so many once-celebrated entrepreneurs turned out to be crooks?
- the entrepreneurial idea has gone mainstream, supported by political leaders on the left as well as on the right
- the history of … start-ups reads like a roll-call of business partnerships: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak (Apple), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Mark Zuckerberg, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (Facebook). Ben and Jerry’s was formed when two childhood friends, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, got together to start an ice-cream business (they wanted to go into the bagel business but could not raise the cash). Richard Branson (Virgin) relied heavily on his cousin, Simon Draper, as well as other partners. [WHY DON’T WE TEACH THE IMPORTANCE OF BUILDING DIVERSE TEAMS?]
Read the full report here.