Customer Reviews

Entrepreneur Journeys v.4 : Innovation: Need Of the Hour (Volume 4)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It is hard to argue with the basic premise of this collection of interviews, namely that innovation driven by entrepreneurs is the key to solving the biggest problems of today. The near financial collapse of late 2008 destabilized markets all around the world and the current levels of governmental budget deficits in the United States are unsustainable. Add in the devastating potential for climate change and it is easy to descend into a state of despair over the state of the world.
This collection of interviews with people that have started companies with new approaches to problems will give you hope. The interviewees are dynamic, original, intelligent and extremely positive about what they are doing. It is also refreshing to hear from people whose goal is to change the world rather than simply extract cash from it. The interviewees are also refreshingly candid about what they see as the failures of businesses to look beyond three months and their inability to accept short-term reductions in share value in order to reap much greater value in the future. A specific point of emphasis is in how the entrepreneur can fund their idea without having to give up critical control of their company.
In great crises there is always great opportunity and people with courage and a great idea for a new way to do things during a crisis can do things that will help alleviate the problems and make a great deal of money. If you are such a person, the inspirational nature of this book may be the last push of encouragement that will set you on the path to success.

Entrepreneur Journeys v.4 : Innovation: Need Of the Hour (Volume 4)is my favorite of the Entrepreneur Journey series book. Sramana dives right in with several entrepreneurs who have created successful technology-based businesses in software, services, clean tech, etc., focusing on how the entrepreneur first determined there was indeed a need in their market and how they rose to meet that need through innovation process that had not been tried before. It's as if you are in a coffee shop, having a very relaxed but very candid conversation with the CEO of each of the companies profiled where they share their strategies, insights and even mistakes. There is much to learn from this book.

The book also tackles innovation from a broader perspective of how should government, universities, investors and entrepreneurs work together on larger scale research initiatives that are beyond the means of a single entity is able to accomplish on its own.

I definitely recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn about innovation and entrepreneurship.

Volume 4 of Sramana Mitra's Entrepreneur Journeys series helped me most by inspiring me and giving me hope. The interviews she has in the book are eye-opening, and make it clear that innovation and entrepreneurship are the key elements to solving this financial crisis. The way the book was broken down was extremely helpful, as she presented a clear idea and then discussed that idea in a comprehensive interview with another successful entrepreneur. Her thoughts on how to move forward and bring change to the world are truly inspiring, and, when coupled with the words of successful entrepreneurs, can change the way you think about innovation.

Sramana Mitra is a successful businesswoman who has developed specific and focused ideas on how entrepreneurs can improve their chances, how this can help the economy, and how the economy itself might better be structured to encourage this worthwhile outcome. She promotes this thinking through her consulting, and then spins her carefully organized observations into a series of wonderful books on the theme.

A particularly valuable characteristic of the books is that Mitra's own thinking on the theme of each book is organized into a clearly-structured argument which is then expressed in brief, lucid essays, which are themselves then amplified with really informative and productive interviews she conducts with successful entrepreneurs whose experience in the area discussed is instructive. I have found that these interviews are also filled with terrific and hard-won insight into more generally important - even vital - aspects of management, making these books a real treasure to read.

The latest in this series is certainly no exception. It builds on the overall trend of the arguments in the book series, which began by describing the entrepreneurial process, moved on to discuss core managerial approaches for succeeding with it, to - in the current book, "Innovation" - analyzing the importance of the entrepreneurial function itself to a vibrant, healthy economy. In this context, innovation as an economic activity that produces groundbreaking advances is the focus, rather than the incremental process-improvement form of innovation that many managers concern themselves with.

Both forms are vital to an intelligent, productive economy that supports a dynamic, forward-moving society. Due to her entrepreneurial background, Mitra naturally sees most prominently and celebrates the groundbreaking style. Her essays and interview explore the issue intelligently and thought-provokingly. You will find much of immediately practical benefit in them both as a manager and, surprisingly and pleasantly, even as a citizen.

What's more, even though it isn't specifically targeted, you will find that Mitra's success in business and consulting result in expressions in the book of key clues to the link between the groundbreaking and incremental forms of innovation. After all, you don't want merely to discover a profitable idea - you want to build an enduringly profitable business around it.

Pick up Sramana Mitra's "Innovation" today, and enjoy!

Don't worry if you haven't read any of the three previous volumes, as this latest in the series is a great read in and of itself. Author Sramana Mitra, a noted contributor to Forbes magazine and a veteran of the VC industry and the world of entrepreneurship once again lets her subjects tell their great stories.

In Volume 4, Mitra structures the interviews around the central thesis that we have a societal need to innovate our way out of the challenges we face today. She digs deep into the past as well as finding more recent examples of the type of creativity that we can only hope will not be stifled by regulation and taxation. Once again, she hits lots of different industries, including Clean Tech, software, alternative energy, healthcare and many others. A feature that I like, given that I am an analyst who researches public companies, is that many of her interviews are with entrepreneurs who have taken their companies public. In this volume, she profiles several who may reach that achievement in the next couple of years but also Tom Leighton, one of the founders of Akamai (AKAM) and Jonathan Bush of athenahealth (ATHN).

The structure of the book allows the reader to progress as slowly or as quickly as he or she wishes. There are four main sections, each with 2-5 conversations. I was captivated, so I read it very quickly, but it's so compartmentalized that it could also be read over several weeks with the same impact to the reader.

As with the other volumes, Mitra's direction of the interviews adds a lot. I liked that she addressed some really big issues and tied that theme through the book. This volume too left me hopeful that we as a society can rise to meet the challenges of the big problems with energy, the environment, healthcare, etc. Hopefully, risk-taking will not be a victim of the Great Recession and Mitra can describe in one of her future works what great companies arose from the ashes.

This book was OK. It was easy to read, and included some nice interviews with entrepreneurs. But there did not seem to be a clear message to be gleemed from a book that should have had a sound beginning, solid middle, and on-point end. The book includes 13 interviews spread throughout the following chapters:

0. Prologue
1. Legendary Innovators
2. Innovators in Academia
3. Cross-Domain Innovators
4. Shoestring Innovators
5. Epilogue

On a Wikipedia Web page it is stated that innovation "may refer to an incremental emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations." I go along with this concept of innovation, and as such, believe writing a book about entrepreneurial innovation that comprises only 235 pages cannot really do the subject justice. And by merely stringing 13 interview sessions together it was impossible to do the subject justice.

The premise of the book is that the world, and America in particular, has been facing tough economic times since the start of 2008. The ability to obtain credit to fund a startup or grow an existing company has become incredibly difficult or even impossible. And since money is tight today, the number of people willing to start something that is risky to start (something innovative) is small. So with credit scarce and the number of people willing to create innovative companies small the world (and America) don't have much hope of jumpstarting a downed economy and creating lots of jobs for the underemployed and unemployed.

In years past the US has had more money and success in the business world than most other countries. Its citizens and immigrants who came to the US could take advantage of the prosperity in the US and take risks and start companies that were innovative. There was a system in place that allowed wanta-be entrepreneurs and already-established entrepreneurs to play the game of entrepreneurship. It included technologically savvy individuals, people from academia, investors, and firms that would batch investors' money (VC and/or investment banks). This book points out that the system is ailing presently.

Probably the biggest shortcomng I found with the book was that it seemed to advocate healing the ailing system. I'm not sure that will be possible first off. And secondly, even if it were possible, I don't think the old system entrepreneurs used can support the creation of enough new businesses that will do away with the underemployment and unemployment the US (and the world) are facing today.

What I see as the problem in the US is an education system that produces graduates who only know how to apply for a job upon graduation. They don't have an entrepreneurial bone in their bodies. They expect the government to create jobs for them. They expect entrepreneurs to create jobs for them. And if nobody creates a job for them, then they sit at home and watch TV while collecting welfare or mooching off their parents. The only way the US (and the world) is going to heal its ailing entrepreneurial ecosystem is to get the masses to quit thinking in terms of getting a job and start thinking in terms of creating jobs for themselves and others. Having a few entrepreneurs creating jobs for the masses isn't going to work. But having the masses become entrepreneurs themselves will work.

What I liked about this book was the 13 interviews. We hear from 13 entrepreneurs who give the reader some insight into what it takes to start a company that can be categorized as innovative according to the definition I cite herein above from Wikipedia. I think the book is worth getting and reading just to get these 13 interviews. But the book on the whole was just OK. 3 stars!

This book started out strong on the premise that we need to focus more on rewarding the inventor and less on rewarding the one selling the invention. By doing so, we will have more inventions, we will get those inventions sooner, and they may very well be of a higher caliber. When we focus on rewarding the seller, there is less incentive to create and so needs that could be met are just ignored or deferred until the existing product's market interest is exhausted. The result is a technologically slow-moving society, where we could be much further at this point if the paradigm changed.

That was the first section of the book and did not take many pages to say. The rest of the book is made up of interviews with different inventors and technology top-dogs. This could have been a plus if the author had taken the most interesting excerpts and compiled them into a short interview section. Instead, she just wrote the whole thing word-for-word which feels like filler and gets very boring. Not a lot of information is taken away from this book that provides any value to an entrepreneur or inventor for starting their business or taking it to the next level; no "jewels" that help give an edge.

I haven't read the earlier entries in the Entrepreneur Journeys series, but I have read Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work. In fact, that book of interviews with entrepreneurs was so compelling that it played a key role in getting me to leave a PhD program and get involved in the thriving tech startup scene. It offered glimpses into both the fabled early days of Silicon Valley (through the eyes of Steve Wozniak, for one) and to some of the more recent startups that Jessica herself played a role in funding (such as Reddit).

"Need of the Hour" focuses on more recent companies, such as Akamai. (Most are more obscure.) To her credit, SM gets her interviewees to go into many of the nitty-gritty details of fundraising in Silicon Valley, making this a useful and timely text for entrepreneurs. But she also has an annoying habit of injecting herself into the interviews: "I have never even thought of myself as a woman," she tells serial entrepreneur Judy Estrin; "First-time entrepeneurs, in my opinion, should not take on capital-intensive projects," she tells FireEye founder Ashar Aziz; and so on. She also injects several prosaic 2-3 page essays into the book about the importance of this problem or that (the smart grid, electronic medical records...). It feels like an effort to reach a broad audience, even though the book touts its technical business content: "...pragmatic and profitable solutions using practical methodologies, such as consulting on intellectual property to generate cash flow" (to quote the back cover).

For the right audience--startup founders seeking capital--this is a meaty, informative book. Other readers will likely feel undernourished.

A sidebar interview with the author in a recent issue of "IEEE Spectrum" magazine made me aware of this "Entrepreneur Journeys" series of books. Although Mitra does write introductions to each of the sections of this book, other than the comments she shares as part of her questioning, the bulk of what she provides to readers are the interviews themselves. In this respect, this collection of interviews reminds me of "Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming" (see my review), by Peter Seibel, although the interview direction here is not as weighty, and is concentrated at the business level, although technology is discussed to some extent because of the nature of the products with which the interviewee entrepreneurs have been associated.

Mitra groups the 13 interviews in this series entry into 4 loose categories: "Legendary Innovators", "Innovators in Academia", "Cross-Domain Innovators", and "Shoestring Innovators". The reason I use the term "loose" is because the interviewees can feasibly be categorized in a multitude of ways, and the interviewer decided to concentrate on innovation. The author notes in her prologue that "In this volume, I offer a multitude of lenses through which entrepreneurs can look at innovation in its various forms and decide on the right course of action for themselves. And as before, I have included a discussion on bootstrapping and shoestring innovation, which still remains one of the most practical ways to circumvent the early-stage fund crunch while maintaining control and freedom."

What the author provides here are really case studies in entrepreneurship, and while she presents a wide variety of technology business scenarios to which not all readers will be able to connect directly, the discussions provide substantive material to ponder and apply to their own journeys. For example, Judy Estrin, who co-founded Bridge Communications, remarks that "We were very passionate about this idea of interconnecting networks. However, we were not so passionate and so fixated that we were unwilling to realize that the interconnect business opportunity would take longer to develop and that it was too far ahead of its time."

Paul Cook, who co-founded Raychem, remarks that "The main principles I believe in, in terms of succeeding in business, are as follows: First, pick a technology niche that you can lead in, that others haven't done before, and that you can master. Then develop products based on that technology to enable high prices relative to cost, yielding a good gross profit. This will allow you to continue to spend on additional product development as well as investing in sales and marketing necessary for new innovations." And later, "You have to have a market pull. There has to be a market out there that wants your product."

Founder of FireEye, Ashar Aziz, comments that "For an entrepreneur, it's tricky to balance timing. You can be too early and the market is not there, or too late when there are too many competitors. There is a strike window, but it's not obvious where that strike window is. It's like landing a fighter jet on an aircraft carrier, the landing strip is very tiny and moving all over the place. Here is my very generic advice for entrepreneurship, which you can apply to any domain. Generally, an entrepreneur is looking for opportunities. The question to ask is why are incumbents not taking advantage of the opportunity? If there is food at the table, why are the bigger guys not eating it?"

Athenahealth founder Jonathan Bush mentions that "We've been hard at work bringing about the death of the old-fashioned software companies that dominate healthcare IT. Their business models and companies should be dead - they've been doing a great job of falling apart. Now, thanks to the federal government, they'll be given another five years to live, which will slow us down and prevent the evolution of software-enabled service business models. Eventually, they're going to die because at a fundamental level they do the wrong thing. This is a long-term lesson about how important it is for marketplaces to disrupt themselves. But overall it won't hurt us. In fact, it has brought a lot of attention, energy, debate, and focus. That may allow the best model to win yet."

As a consultant, I especially enjoyed the "Open Source Means Business" group of interviews within the "Shoestring Innovators" section of this book. CollabNet founder Brian Behlendorf comments that "I had never worked for a big company, so I always assumed the software engineering management had all the development problems sorted out - that it was just us cheapskates in the open-source world who were making do with simple tools. In reality, corporations had no tools to enable engineering teams to work across geographic boundaries with insight into other team's efforts." And John Roberts, founder of SugarCRM, remarks that "This notion of building proprietary software that was a complete secret, followed by massive high-end sales forces selling it door to door didn't make sense when in reality only a dime per dollar was used on the product."

Yes - there is coursework relating to becoming an entrepreneur, but of course you really either have it or don't.

The interviews in this book were very inspiring and enjoyable to experience through this book. Initially I had not realized that this was part of a several volume series, but you don't have to have all the volumes to enjoy this book.

They talk about innovation, validating ideas, business model options, there are anecdotes and stories to inspire you that even though the world's economy is in turmoil now is the time to take the risk and be bold and emerge in the struggling economy.

I suppose the biggest challenge that most startups have is funding problems. And this book discusses how to navigate around those early financial challenges so you can still maintain freedom and control of your new business, you'll have plenty of other worries. I recently watched a new business with poor startup funding ideas and they overspent where they could have rented or bought used or co-oped and they wanted the newest and best and ran out of money before they could pay the bills.