Innovators & Entrepreneurs, again

Yesterday I was in a university meeting which included people that variably teach innovation and entrepreneurship, in the context of technology start-ups.

When I heard the words ‘innovator’ and ‘entrepreneur’ being used interchangeably I compelled myself, against every ounce of my being that was screaming at me to let it go, to attempt to explain that innovators and entrepreneurs are usually very different people with very different disciplines.

This was apparently news to them.

Innovators in the start-up world, I explained, are people that see problems that need fixing or identify opportunities that needs grasping, or that just like cool new technology, and come up with hitherto unexpected technology packages around these that they think the world should love.

Their core disciplines are technology and a little bit of product and strategic marketing. Sometime the good ones will have deep experience in the industry that they are disintermediating.

In the context of start-ups, an innovator is often the founder of a company and will end up as the CTO after a round or two of funding.

Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, are those people that typically replace the founders as CEOs after a round or two of funding.

Their core skills are; raising money off investors (the good ones have been VCs at some stage so understand the psychology of this beast), directing sales and marketing efforts towards global domination, hiring great managers to take care of the daily stuff, and selling companies to corporations or the public markets.

Whereas innovators are focused on what benefits their output can bring to the customers, entrepreneurs are focused on how much money they can make by getting start-up enterprise value up, and up, and then crystallised.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes you will find people that have all the skills and can be, or have been, both innovators and entrepreneurs.

But this is the take-home message in this missive, one cannot usefully practice at being an innovator and an entrepreneur at the same time. At any particular moment one has to choose which hat one is going to wear in a particular start-up.

A great entrepreneur will also ignore their own ideas and just assess and assimilate those of others. He or she knows that we cannot properly assess the risks in our own, lovely, lovely, ideas.

Back to the teaching caper.

Innovation skills for start-ups should be taught alongside Engineering and IT degrees so these guys at least have some means to look at the real world in order to identify opportunities that are worth working on.

Entrepreneurship should not be taught in universities at all. It should be learnt by apprenticeship, working with older and more experienced CEOs or investors. And the rest of the skills will be passed onto them, on an as needed basis when problems arise, by their group of trusted and experienced personal mentors.