Innovator v. Entrepreneur

Many people in my game make the mistake of thinking that innovators and entrepreneurs are the same beast, or at least heavily correlated.

They can be but they often are not.

I have seen many startups where the core concepts are provided by a very innovative technology founder who had zero entrepreneurial skills.

And then the investors inevitably parachute in a high quality entrepreneur who couldn’t innovate his or her (I saw a ‘her’ once) way out of a brown paper bag.

All an entrepreneur needs to be able to do is recognise the innovation of others.

In fact, it’s probably better that entrepreneurs don’t innovate themselves because we all unduly weight the importance of our own ideas.