Review – Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Innovation and Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

by Peter F. Drucker, published 1985, 2006

This was a deep book with a ton of ideas and examples. It isn’t going to be easy for me to narrow it down to some concise takeaway, so I won’t try. This post will be more of an annotated outline of the contents of the book.

Where entrepreneurship comes from

Successful entrepreneurs are characterized by action, not inspiration. Innovations that seem big on paper may turn out to be minor businesses, while simple ideas can capture the imagination or appreciation of the marketplace in unexpected ways and scale beyond anyone’s dreams. Successful entrepreneurs are focused on creating value and making a contribution, not their potential financial returns.

There are four sources for innovation within an enterprise:

1. The unexpected
2. The incongruity
3. Innovation based on process need
4. Changes in industry structure or market structure

There are also three sources for innovation outside an enterprise:

1. Demographics
2. Changes in perception, mood or meaning
3. New knowledge

The unexpected

Quotes:

The unexpected success is a challenge to management’s judgment… The unexpected success is simply not seen at all. Nobody pays any attention to it… No one even looks at the areas where the company has done better than expected… It forces us to ask, What basic changes are now appropriate for this organization in the way it defines its business? Its technology? Its markets? …It must be properly featured in the information management obtains and studies… Management needs to set aside specific time in which to discuss unexpected successes. Someone should always be designated to analyze an unexpected success and to think through how it could be exploited… The unexpected failure demands that you go out, look around, and listen. Failure should always be considered a symptom of an innovative opportunity, and taken seriously as such.

Questions to ask:

• What would it mean to us if we exploited it?
• Where could it lead us?
• What would we have to do to convert it into an opportunity?
• How do we go about it?

If something unexpected happens in one’s operations, it means there is a break in the knowledge between cause and effect and it likely represents an opportunity to innovate and improve.

Incongruities

Quotes:

If the demand for a product or a service is growing steadily, its economic performance should steadily improve, too. It should be easy to be profitable in an industry with steadily rising demand… The innovation that successfully exploits an incongruity between economic realities has to be simple rather than complicated, “obvious” rather than grandiose… Behind the incongruity between actual and perceived reality, there always lies an element of intellectual arrogance, of intellectual rigor and dogmatism… No customer ever perceives himself as buying what the producer or supplier delivers… [Businesses often complain of customers who are] “irrational” or “unwilling to pay for quality.” Whenever such a complaint is heard, there is reason to assume that the values and expectations the producer or supplier holds to be real are incongruous with the actual values and expectations of customers and clients… The incongruity within a process, its rhythm or its logic, is not a very subtle matter. Users are always aware of it.

The comment about the incongruity between what a customer perceives himself to be buying versus what the producer thinks they are delivering is an aspect of Jobs To Be Done theory. The main idea there is that customers are not purchasing a product or service, but a specific solution to a task that the product or service enables them to implement. An interesting entrepreneurial opportunity is to redefine one’s business and processes in terms of JTBD to look for closer alignment to customer needs and expectations.

Industry and market changes

Indicators of industry change:

1. rapid growth of an industry
2. perception and servicing of market inappropriate due to growth
3. convergence of technologies that hitherto were seen as distinctly separate

Demographics

Quotes:

Demographics have major impact on what will be bought, by whom, and in what quantities.

The massive nineteenth-century migration from Europe to the Americas, both North and South, and to Australia and New Zealand, changed the economic and political geography of the world beyond recognition. It created an abundance of entrepreneurial opportunities. It made obsolete the geopolitical concepts on which European politics and military strategies had been based for several centuries. Yet it took place in a mere fifty years from the mid-1860s to 1914. Whoever disregarded it was likely to be left behind, and fast.

Static populations staying in one place for long periods of time have been the exception historically rather than the rule… It is sheer folly to disregard demographics… Demographic shifts in this century may be inherently unpredictable, yet they do have long lead times before impact, and lead times, moreover, which are predictable… What makes demographics such a rewarding opportunity for the entrepreneur is precisely its neglect by decisions makers, whether businessmen, public-service staffs, or governmental policymakers.

This unwillingness, or inability, of the experts to accept demographic realities which do not conform to what they take for granted gives the entrepreneur his opportunity. The lead times are known. The events themselves have already happened. But no one accepts them as reality, let alone as opportunity. Those who defy the conventional wisdom and accept the facts– indeed, those who go actively looking for them — can therefore expect to be left alone for quite a long time. The competitors will accept demographic reality, as a rule, only when it is already about to be replaced by a new demographic change and a new demographic reality.

For those genuinely willing to go out into the field, to look and to listen, changing demographics is both a highly productive and a highly dependable innovative opportunity.

The demographics section was one that surprised me most because demographics is something I don’t typically pay attention to, and I often find the attempt to categorize entire groups of people (“Millenials”) as behaving or valuing a certain way to be overwrought, but Drucker made sense of it for me in showing how predictable and inescapable various demographic realities are. In the broadest terms, demographics put floors and ceilings on certain aspects of market supply and demand, ie, there can only be so many people producing X, or so many people consuming Y. In more specific terms, it helps us to understand how cycles or patterns of generational growth (ie, this cohort of people is entering retirement, while this different sized one is entering adolescence) suggests where opportunities will congregate in the market space for products and services that are used by those cohorts. I think I want to try paying a lot more attention to this going forward and will investigate some demographic books I’ve heard about, such as [amazon text=Generations: The History of America’s Future&asin=0688119123].

The comment about demographics offering opportunity because it is neglected by others reminded me of Warren Buffett’s success. He possesses a deeply statistical mind and spent his childhood collecting what amounted to demographic data. He was obsessed with it. He also began investing at the cusp of the Baby Boom explosion which continued through most of his career. When he describes the reason he invested in a business like Coca-Cola, he explains it in demographic terms (X cokes a day, for Y people, with population growing at X% a year, translates to earnings of A).

This section also highlighted for me how important it is to may attention to the unique demographics of your market when hiring employees and designing customer processes. Ostensibly, if you knew a lot of your customers were of a certain age, gender, ethnic or educational background, you’d probably want to hire people like them to serve them, and design customer processes that compliment their world view. And you’d have an embedded advantage against competitors not thinking that deeply, who would look at what you’re doing and not understand why it was extra effective.

Changes in perception

Quotes:

When a change in perception takes place, the facts do not change. Their meaning does.

There is nothing more dangerous than to be premature in exploiting a change in perception. A good many of what look like changes in perception turn out to be short-lived fads.

New knowledge

Quotes:

The number of knowledge-based innovators that will survive when an industry matures and stabilizes is therefore no larger than it has traditionally been. But largely because of the emergence of a world market and of global communications, the number of entrants during the “window” period has greatly increased. When the shakeout comes, the casualty rate is therefore much higher than it used to be. And the shakeout always comes; it is inevitable.

Which ones will survive, which ones will die, and which ones will become permanently crippled– able neither to live nor to die — is unpredictable. In fact, it is futile to speculate.

This section made me think about the emergent “social media” industry, and the “blue chip” status of the FAANG stocks. These industries are too new for the shakeout to have taken place yet but it is startling indeed to think of a company with a $500B+ market cap ending up as roadkill from a future shakeup.

Principles of innovation – the do’s, the don’t, the conditions

Quotes:

All the sources of innovative opportunity should be systematically analyzed and systematically studied. The search must be done on a regular, systematic basis… [Ask] “What does this innovation have to reflect so that the people who have to use it will want to use it and see in it their opportunity?” …All effective innovations are breathtakingly simple. “This is obvious. Why didn’t I think of it?” …Effective innovations starts small. They try to do one specific thing. Otherwise, there is not enough time to make the adjustments and changes that are almost always needed for an innovation to succeed.

All strategies aimed at exploiting an innovation, must achieve leadership within a given environment. Otherwise they will simply create an opportunity for competition… Unless there is an immediate application in the present, an innovation is like the drawings in Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook– a “brilliant idea.” …When all is said and done, innovation becomes hard, focused and purposeful work making very great demands on diligence, on persistence, and on commitment.

[Ask] “Which of these opportunities fits me, fits this company, puts to work what we (or I) are good at and have shown capacity for in performance?” …[Successful entrepreneurs] are not ‘risk-takers.’ They try to define the risks they have to take and to minimize them as much as possible… Defending yesterday — that is, not innovating — is far more risky than making tomorrow… [They are] not “risk-focused” but “opportunity-focused.”

The entrepreneurial business

Quotes:

It is not size that is an impediment to entrepreneurship and innovation; it is the existing operation itself, and especially the existing successful operation… The new always looks so small, so puny, so unpromising next to the size and performance of maturity. Anything truly new that looks big is indeed to be distrusted… Entrepreneurial businesses treat entrepreneurship as a duty; if entrepreneurship and innovation do not well up in an organization, something must be stifling them. [They ask] “How can we make the organization receptive to innovation, want innovation, reach for it, work for it?” …Innovation must be part and parcel of the ordinary, the norm, if not routine.

[Ask yourself] would we now go into this product, this market, this distributive channel, this technology today? …[If you answer no, ask yourself] “What do we have to do to stop wasting resources on this product, this market, this distributive channel, this staff activity?” …Every organism needs to eliminate its waste products or else it poisons itself.

In companies that are managed for entrepreneurship, there are therefore two meetings on operating results: one to focus on the problems and one to focus on the opportunities. …”What did we do that turned out to be successful?” “How did we find the opportunity?” “What have we learned, and what entrepreneurial and innovative plans do we have in hand now?”

A member of the top management group sits down with the junior people from research, engineering, manufacturing, marketing and accounting and so on… This practice has one built-in requirement. Those who suggest anything new, or even a change in the way things are being done, whether in respect to product or process, to market or service, should be expected to go to work. They should be asked to submit, within a reasonable period, a working paper to the presiding senior and to their colleges in the sessions, in which they try to develop their idea. What would it look like if converted into reality? What in turn does the reality have to look like for the idea to make sense? What are the assumptions regarding customers and markets, and so on. How much work is needed… how much money and how many people… and how much time? And what results might be expected?

“What results do we expect from this project? When do we expect those results? When do we appraise the progress of the project so that we have control?” …For the existing business to be capable of innovation, it has to create a structure that allows people to be entrepreneurial.

In this section, Drucker argues that entrepreneurship is a culture and a practice, not a characteristic of being small, new or in a technological field. Any company can be entrepreneurial if it creates the right conditions for entrepreneurial thinking and acting, is open to entrepreneurial discoveries and treats entrepreneurship as an important, embedded business practice (much like it would treat having good accounting controls, or written customer processes).

One idea I had after reading this was to implement something like an  Innovation Circle/Council within the company, a rotating and inclusive membership of line managers and staff, asking questions like:

• What do you need help with? Where do you seem to get stuck or overwhelmed?
• What went well that you can teach to others?
• What ideas have you had recently for improving the way we do business?

Entrepreneurship in the service institution

Quotes:

Failure to attain the objectives in the quest for a “good” only means that efforts need to be redoubled. The forces of evil must be far more powerful than expected and need to be fought even harder.

For thousands of years the preachers of all sorts of religions have held forth against the “sins of the flesh.” Their success has been limited to say the least. But this is no argument as far as the preachers are concerned. It does not persuade them to devote their considerable talents to pursuits in which results may be more easily attainable. On the contrary, it only proves that their efforts need to be redoubled. Avoiding the “sins of the flesh” is clearly a “moral good”, and thus an absolute, which does not admit of any cost/benefit calculation.

It needs something that is genuinely attainable and therefore a commitment to a realistic goal, so that it can say eventually, “Our job is finished.” …If an objective has not been attained after repeated tries, one has to assume that it is the wrong one. It is not rational to consider failure a good reason for trying again and again.

A central economic problem of developed societies during the next twenty or thirty years is surely going to be capital formation; only in Japan is it still adequate for the economy’s needs. We therefore can ill afford to have activities conducted as “non-profit,” that is, as activities that devour capital rather than form it, if they can be organized as activities that form capital, as activities that make a profit.

This will date this post, but I think there are a lot of parallels in this paragraph and the problems it touches upon to what is going in the US federal government and political system with accusations of improprieties with Donald Trump. So far, no one has come up with a credible claim and evidence that Trump has done something nefarious, yet the more failures that are revealed, the more emboldened the opposition becomes that they must resist Trump and stop him before it’s too late. It’s comical.

The larger point here is that because service organizations don’t have a simple Profit/Loss acid test like a commercial business, they need some other objective KPI connected to a limited duration/scope mission they can look to to see if they’re effective.

The philosophical point in the last paragraph is also interesting. Most modern commentators would argue we have too much capital, not too little, and too much for-profit businesses and entities. The rise of “social entrepreneurship” is part of this belief that young, energetic people should devote themselves to changing the world, for free. I think they’re wrong and Drucker was prescient. But then, he studied economics and they haven’t, so that is no surprise. In fact, one of the joys of reading this book is that Drucker is one of the last great German/Viennese intellectuals of the 20th Century, which means he is widely read and knowledgeable on the subjects he opines on. That is a rarity in the 21st Century.

The new venture

Requirements:

• a focus on the market
• planning for cash flow and capital needs ahead of time
• building a top management team long before the new venture actually needs one and long before it can actually afford one
• the founding entrepreneur to decide on his or her own role, area of work and relationships

Quotes:

One cannot do market research for something genuinely new.

The new venture needs to build in systematic practices to remind itself that a “product” or a “service” is defined by the customer, not by the producer.

Growth has to be fed. Growth in a new venture demands adding financial resources rather than taking them out. Growth needs more cash and more capital. If the growing new venture shows a “profit” it is a fiction; since taxes are payable on this fiction in most countries, it creates a liability and a cash drain rather than “surplus.” The healthier a new venture and the faster it grows, the more financial feeding it requires.

“What will the venture need objectively by way of management from here on out?”

The idea of growth needing feeding, and the tax implications of realizing profitability too soon, was a challenging thing for me to read. Of course, it brings to mind the growth models of companies like Uber and Amazon. I still don’t know what to make of this. Part of me thinks if you can’t grow profitably, you aren’t really growing at all, but consuming capital and putting it on an income statement. But what Drucker is saying also makes sense in that there could be a business model that can be profitable at a meaningful scale and between then and now, it requires great investment to get there.

Entrepreneurial strategies

Quotes:

“Hitting them where they ain’t” is a strategy that involves serving markets created by pioneers which are currently being serviced poorly.

“Creaming” is a violation of elementary managerial and economic precepts. It is always punished by loss of market… “Quality” in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes “quality.”  …A “premium” price is always an invitation to the competition… The only way to get a higher profit margin is through lower costs. Higher prices hold an umbrella over the competitor. “Premium” prices, instead of being an occasion for joy should always be considered a threat and dangerous vulnerability.

Don’t make the mistake of maximizing versus optimizing… A benevolent monopolist cuts his prices before a competitor can cut them. And he makes his product obsolete and introduces new product before a competitor can do so.

Successful practitioners of the ecological niche take the cash and let the credit go. They wallow in their anonymity.

Price is usually almost irrelevant in the strategy of creating utility. What is truly a “service,” truly a “utility” to the customer? …What Gillette did was to price what the customer buys, namely, the shave, rather than what the manufacturer sells… It charges for what represents “value” to the customer rather than what represents “cost” to the supplier… What does the customer really buy?

One question it seems like one would want to ask when reviewing one’s operations for entrepreneurial opportunities is, “Does this represent value to our customer?” One should eliminate if the answer is no, or try to find ways to do more of that if the answer is yes.

Optimizing versus maximizing is a really interesting conundrum. It’s connected to the idea of market segmentation. When one maximizes, one is trying to satisfy every single user through the same product or service. It leads to opportunities for disruption and more appropriate market segmentation, as well as the weakening and irrelevancy of the incumbent and often the loss of the advantage that gave it its initial market position. An extreme offender in this regard speaking contemporaneously is the behavior of “luxury” auto makers like Lexus, BMW and Mercedes, who are constantly moving down-market into silly, small, over-priced offerings in an effort to make luxury more accessible. They realize they are fighting over the same limited number of actually wealthy, luxury customers, and they still want to grow their production and so they create new markets of non-luxury buyers to serve.

You have to accept the limits of your market and create a new specialized product or service to meet the needs of those outside of it. Any other path is folly. But folly is the heritage of mankind.

Thinking about service and utility in terms of the customer’s perspective, I think you could explore the idea of when the customer chooses a competitor, what are they buying from them? It’s easy to think they have just made a decision to go with a different person or group providing the same thing, but it could be more likely that they have gone with a company offering a different thing entirely, as far as they evaluate utility.