One of the business ironies that many entrepreneurs have learned the hard way in the past is that ideas which are truly disruptive carry the highest risk of failure, take the longest to gain traction, and thus are the least likely to get external funding. So some entrepreneurs stick with incremental solutions, avoiding more transformational or adaptive solutions implying disruptive change.
In the past, only a few entrepreneurs, like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, maintained the passion, patience, and determination to accomplish disruptive change in the marketplace. Today with the growing number of disruptive technologies available, like cloud computing, wireless sensors, Big Data, and mobile devices, an incremental solutions mindset is no longer enough to win.
John Sculley, in his classic book “Moonshot!: Game-Changing Strategies to Build Billion-Dollar Businesses” argues that every entrepreneur now needs to think and act like one of those elite entrepreneurs who could go the extra mile and cause disruptive change. He coins the term “adaptive innovator” for the required mindset to characterize the required focus.
I strongly support the key principles he outlines as required to drive the mindset to make business leaders successful in this new world, both in established companies as well as startups. I have summarized or paraphrased the points here, to add my own focus and experience with new entrepreneurs and startups:
- Be forever curious and an optimist. Adaptive innovator entrepreneurs are inspired by what’s possible, but focus on what’s probable. Great entrepreneurs aren’t just dreamers, they are doers. They wake up each day re-energized and optimistic, curious about the world around them, but always committed to getting real things done.
- Unpack your best ideas. Unpacking an idea is about taking deep dives into it; twisting and turning it to see the concept in different ways. The deeper your dive into an idea, the more creative will be your insights. Ideas without context are just a commodity. Context comes from experience. Trying and failing is an experience building-block to get context.
- Learn more every day in layers. Let every new bit of learning spark your curiosity to build a new layer of knowledge, which will then drive another layer of learning. Thinking visually can help. Listen for insights from others, and follow-up on every reference to spark new learning. It’s the reverse of peeling layers off an onion.
- Never give up in finding a better way. Steve Jobs was never satisfied, and kept pushing himself and everyone around him. He kept raising the bar. At Apple, when a product actually shipped, against unimaginable timelines, even the most talented and skeptical on the team were amazed and empowered by what they had accomplished.
- Prepare incessantly and daily. The best athletes are naturally gifted, but even they train constantly and invest hours of practice every day. It’s no different for the best adaptive entrepreneurs. The most formidable tools of the adaptive innovator are smart personal productivity aids to help realize your dream. Learn to use these tools effectively.
- Put the customer at the center of your business concept. As you consider a really transformative business concept, leverage your domain expertise and create a customer experience never realized before in that industry. Couple this with automation and technology to offer a disruptive solution. The customer, not the technology, is in control.
Sculley correlates many of these principles to the lessons he learned and insights from his failures at Apple, as well as his entrepreneurial successes before, during, and after Apple. We both agree that the marketplace and pace of technology have changed since the days that Jobs and Wozniak started Apple, so the entrepreneurial and investor mindset has to change as well.
If you are a new entrepreneur, you can still choose to “play it safe” with incremental innovation to improve your initial funding chances, but getting funding won’t be very satisfying if you can’t compete, and lose it all. It’s time to adopt the adaptive innovator entrepreneur mindset principles listed above, capitalize on the game-changing new technologies, and go for the gold.