Big Idea Social Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career

Late last year I wrote on this blog about my frustration with the lack of Big Ideas driving innovation. My rant was stimulated by a New York Times article on the grim underbelly of the “an app for everything” culture: people who were working on “small ideas,” and losing their shirts in the process. I also shared the thoughts of other entrepreneurial leaders, investors, and journalists, also bemoaning the fact that we seem to have lost our way, and are no longer thinking BIG. This morning I stumbled on a post on the HBR Blog Network, entitled “Idea Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career.” I took some editorial license and added the words “Big” and “Social” to my blog post, simply because the author was actually making the case for Big Ideas and Social Entrepreneurship, and the hopeful sign that there may be a re-emergence of people who care about Big Ideas. Read my original post here, followed by the HBR Blog post.

The concept of “social entrepreneurship” has noticeably taken off with this generation of young people. While there some debate about the definition of “social entrepreneurship,” I am comfortable with the following explanation.

A social entrepreneur is a person who pursues novel applications that have the potential to solve community-based problems, both large and small. These individuals are willing to take on the risk and effort to create positive changes in society through their initiatives.

Examples of social entrepreneurship include microfinance institutions, educational programs, providing banking services in underserved areas and helping children orphaned by epidemic disease. Their efforts are connected to a notion of addressing unmet needs within communities that have been overlooked or not granted access to services, products, or base essentials available in more developed communities. A social entrepreneur might also seek to address imbalances in such availability, the root causes behind such social problems, or social stigma associated with being a resident of such communities. The main goal of a social entrepreneur is not to earn a profit, but rather to implement widespread improvements in society. However, a social entrepreneur must still be financially savvy to succeed in his or her cause.

I had the good fortune of working with the global social entrepreneurship NGO, Enactus and a group of my students from the UBC Faculty of Management. We interacted with other social entrepreneurship groups as far afield as Perth, Australia, and Rotterdam in the Netherlands to develop our own project. Enactus categorizes projects by the potential for the project to become self-sustaining by the participants, and the original project volunteers working themselves out of a job. Our project was designed to meet the highest categorization within Enactus. We designed a roof-top hydroponic vegetable garden project that would produce high yield cash crop fruits and vegetables for the homeless community, managed by a local housing organization. The end goal was to enable the homeless volunteers to take over the operation, generate income for themselves, and collaborate with the charity organization to enter into simple permanent housing.

“Big” Idea Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career

Reblogged from the HBR Blog Network

by John Butman | 10:00 AM May 27, 2013

There is a new player emerging on the cultural and business scene today: the idea entrepreneur. Perhaps you are one yourself — or would like to be. The idea entrepreneur is an individual, usually a content expert and often a maverick, whose main goal is to influence how other people think and behave in relation to their cherished topic. These people don’t seek power over others and they’re not motivated by the prospect of achieving great wealth. Their goal is to make a difference, to change the world in some way.

Idea entrepreneurs are popping up everywhere. They’re people like Sheryl Sandberg (Facebook COO and author of Lean In), who is advocating a big new idea from within an organization. And like Atul Gawande (the checklist doctor), who is working to transform a professional discipline. Or like Blake Mycoskie (founder of TOMS shoes), who has created an unconventional business model.

In my research into this phenomenon (which forms the basis of my book, Breaking Out), I have been amazed at how many different kinds of people aspire to be idea entrepreneurs. I have met with, interviewed, emailed or tweeted with librarians, salespeople, educators, thirteen-year-old kids, marketers, technologists, consultants, business leaders, social entrepreneurs — from countries all over the world — who have an idea, want to go public with it, and, in some cases, build a sustainable enterprise around it.

The ones who succeed — whether it’s disrupting an established way of doing business as Vineet Nayar has done with his company or bringing a mindset change to a small community like Maria Madison has done in Concord, Massachusetts — share the following methods:

They play many roles. They are manager, teacher, motivator, entertainer, coach, thought leader, and guru all rolled into one. Think Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn and author of The Start-Up of You), Daniel Pink (author of Drive) or, in India, Kiran Bedi, leader of a worldwide movement to transform prisons and root out corruption.

They create a platform of expressions and generate revenue to support their social activities. Idea entrepreneurs have to be exceptionally good at expressing their idea, and usually do so in many forms. They give private talks and major speeches, write books and blogs and articles, participate in panels and events, engage in social media — activities that can generate revenue (sometimes in considerable amounts), through a combination of fees, sales of their expressions, and related merchandise. Jim Collins has created a long-lasting enterprise supported by the sale of books and media, as well as fees for consulting, speaking engagements, and workshops.

They offer a practical way to understand and implement their idea. Because people have a hard time responding to an abstract idea, the idea entrepreneur develops practices (and personally models them, too) that lead people to the idea through action. Bryant Terry, an “eco-chef” who argues that good nutrition is the best path to social justice, embeds his ideas in cooking methods and suggestions for social interaction around good food.

They draw other people into their idea. The idea entrepreneur gathers people into the development, expression, and application of their idea. They form affiliations, build networks, and form groups. Al Gore created the Climate Reality Project Leadership Corps to bring his ideas about environmental sustainability to people around the world. Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual leader and author of The Power of Now, has established the online Eckhart Teachings Community with members in 130 countries. This inclusion of many people in many ways creates a phenomenon I call respiration— it’s as if the idea starts to breathe, and takes on a life of its own.

They drive the quest for change. It is all too common that people with an idea for an improvement or a change to the world are satisfied to point out a problem, propose a solution, and then expect others to execute. The idea entrepreneur, however, sees the expression of the idea as the beginning of the effort — and it can be a lifelong one — in which they will continue to build the idea, reach new audiences, and offer practices that lead to change. Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, based in Delhi, believes that world-class sanitation is necessary for India to realize its full potential. In forty years of idea entrepreneurship — spent in writing, speaking, travelling, network building, and technology development — he has influenced the way millions of people think and act.

People who have shaped our thinking and our society over the decades, even centuries, and continue to do so today — from Benjamin Franklin to Mohandas Gandhi to Hannah Salwen, an American teenager who modeled a disruptive approach to philanthropy — have followed the path of the idea entrepreneur.

These days, the model is well-defined and, thanks to the amazing range of activities we have for creating and sharing ideas, is within reach for just about anyone. If you have an idea, and want to go public with it, idea entrepreneurship can be one of the most powerful forces for change and improvement in the world today.

Krugman Joins The Chorus Urging The Return Of Big Ideas In Technology and Venture Capital

Following my recent blog posts on Reid Hoffman, COP21, and an apparent resurgence of Big Ideas in technology, a growing group of venture capitalists are resurrecting their original mission in industry and the economy. Paul Krugman of the New York Times has also noticed and offers his hope that this trend continues. Max Marmer, who wrote his now legendary 2012 Harvard Business Review article, “Reversing the Decline in Big Ideas,” has stimulated a broad rethinking on what we should be focusing. The successful landing of Space X’s Falcon 9 is a hopeful early indication that Elon Musk is one of those on the right track.

Things to Celebrate, Like Dreams of Flying Cars

Reblogged from The New York Times, Opinion Page

Paul Krugman DEC. 25, 2015

In Star Wars, Han Solo’s Millennium Falcon did the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs; in real life, all the Falcon 9 has done so far is land at Cape Canaveral without falling over or exploding. Yet I, like many nerds, was thrilled by that achievement, in part because it reinforced my growing optimism about the direction technology seems to be taking — a direction that may end up saving the world.

O.K., if you have no idea what I’m talking about, the Falcon 9 is Elon Musk’s reusable rocket, which is supposed to boost a payload into space, then return to where it can be launched again. If the concept works, it could drastically reduce the cost of putting stuff into orbit. And that successful landing was a milestone. We’re still a very long way from space colonies and zero-gravity hotels, let alone galactic empires. But space technology is moving forward after decades of stagnation.

And to my amateur eye, this seems to be part of a broader trend, which is making me more hopeful for the future than I’ve been in a while.

You see, I got my Ph.D. in 1977, the year of the first Star Wars movie, which means that I have basically spent my whole professional life in an era of technological disappointment.

Until the 1970s, almost everyone believed that advancing technology would do in the future what it had done in the past: produce rapid, unmistakable improvement in just about every aspect of life. But it didn’t. And while social factors — above all, soaring inequality — have played an important role in that disappointment, it’s also true that in most respects technology has fallen short of expectations.

The most obvious example is travel, where cars and planes are no faster than they were when I was a student, and actual travel times have gone up thanks to congestion and security lines. More generally, there has just been less progress in our command over the physical world — our ability to produce and deliver things — than almost anyone expected.

Now, there has been striking progress in our ability to process and transmit information. But while I like cat and concert videos as much as anyone, we’re still talking about a limited slice of life: We are still living in a material world, and pushing information around can do only so much. The famous gibe by the investor Peter Thiel (“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.”) is unfair, but contains a large kernel of truth.

Over the past five or six years, however — or at least this is how it seems to me — technology has been getting physical again; once again, we’re making progress in the world of things, not just information. And that’s important.

Progress in rocketry is fun to watch, but the really big news is on energy, a field of truly immense disappointment until recently. For decades, unconventional energy technologies kept falling short of expectations, and it seemed as if nothing could end our dependence on oil and coal — bad news in the short run because of the prominence it gave to the Middle East; worse news in the long run because of global warming.

But now we’re witnessing a revolution on multiple fronts. The biggest effects so far have come from fracking, which has ended fears about peak oil and could, if properly regulated, be some help on climate change: Fracked gas is still fossil fuel, but burning it generates a lot less greenhouse emissions than burning coal. The bigger revolution looking forward, however, is in renewable energy, where costs of wind and especially solarhave dropped incredibly fast.

Why does this matter? Everyone who isn’t ignorant or a Republican realizes that climate change is by far the biggest threat humanity faces. But how much will we have to sacrifice to meet that threat?

Well, you still hear claims, mostly from the right but also from a few people on the left, that we can’t take effective action on climate without bringing an end to economic growth. Marco Rubio, for example, insists that trying to control emissions would “destroy our economy.” This was never reasonable, but those of us asserting that protecting the environment was consistent with growth used to be somewhat vague about the details, simply asserting that given the right incentives the private sector would find a way.

But now we can see the shape of a sustainable, low-emission future quite clearly — basically an electrified economy with, yes, nuclear power playing some role, but sun and wind front and center. Of course, it doesn’t have to happen. But if it doesn’t, the problem will be politics, not technology.

True, I’m still waiting for flying cars, not to mention hyperdrive. But we have made enough progress in the technology of things that saving the world has suddenly become much more plausible. And that’s reason to celebrate.

Reid Hoffman: Venture Capitalist Loser | MIT Technology Review

An insightful interview with Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and founder of LinkedIn. But to my mind, Hoffman seems blase’ about Big Ideas and “deep tech” funding. I share the views of Startup Genome founder, Max Marmer, and bemoan the limited focus of VC’s on world-changing technologies, leaving it to billionaire angels. I also sense myopia about the ongoing intense debate over the distortion of the sharing economy by Uber, Airbnb, and others.

UPDATE: Since I wrote this post last week, on November 25th, events swiftly unfolded to underscore the points I made in criticism of Reid Hoffman’s views on venture capital, in his interview with the MIT Technology Review. Bill Gates and a host of global leaders, Silicon Valley industry leaders, and high-tech billionaires announced the Clean Tech Initiative, at the opening of the UN COP21 Climate Change Conference. This initiative precisely makes my point that venture capitalists like Reid Hoffman fail to see their social responsibility, or to examine the ethics of their investments. At the time I wrote the opening paragraph to this post (below), I had absolutely no idea that my points would be validated by Bill Gates, Obama, and high-tech industry leaders Meg Whitman of HP, Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, Alibaba Chairman Jack Ma, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Ratan Tata, retired chairman of India’s Tata Sons, the holding company of the Tata group, and South African billionaire Patrice Motsepe of African Rainbow Minerals. I would now go so far to say that Hoffman’s views are an embarrassment to himself in the face of the vision of others.

An insightful interview with Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist and founder of LinkedIn. But to my mind, Hoffman seems blase’ about Big Ideas and “deep tech” funding. I share the views of Startup Genome founder, Max Marmer, and bemoan the limited focus of VC’s on world-changing technologies, leaving it to billionaire angels. I also sense a myopia about the ongoing intense debate over the distortion of the sharing economy by Uber, Airbnb, and others. Thanks to Gary Reischel for posting this article on his Facebook page.

My attention is focused on two privately funded Big Idea entrepreneurial ventures in Vancouver B.C., General Fusion, and D-Wave. General Fusion and at least two other companies in California and Germany are competing against the two massively funded governmental nuclear fusion projects, ITER at Cadarache in France, and The National Ignition Facility at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Livermore National Labs. D-Wave, is pioneering quantum computing, having successfully sold two early quantum computers to Google and Lockheed Martin/NASA in Silicon Valley.

Max Marmer…read more: Reversing The Decline In Big Ideas

Source: Venture Capital in Transition | MIT Technology Review

VC Reid Hoffman on VC’s Evolution

Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor Reid Hoffman wants venture capital to adapt to an era in which startups must grow faster.

By Robert D. Hof on November 23, 2015

Reid Hoffman has worked the entire tech startup ecosystem: he cofounded LinkedIn in 2002, used the money he made there to become one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific angel investors, invested early in Facebook, Zynga, and many others, and is now a venture capitalist at Greylock Partners. At Greylock, which he joined in 2009, Hoffman has focused his investments on consumer Internet companies that use software to create networks of millions of users, such as the home-sharing site Airbnb.

Startup incubators that nurture entrepreneurs’ early ideas, super-angels who invest small amounts in large numbers of early-stage companies, and project crowdfunding via Internet sites such as Kickstarter are all presenting alternatives to traditional VCs. Hoffman thinks firms like his can compete by providing services such as dedicated teams that recruit engineers and holding dozens of networking and educational events to help startups get big faster. He’s currently teaching a Stanford University class for entrepreneurs in “blitzscaling,” his term for the rapid scaling up of startups.

Hoffman spoke with MIT Technology Review contributing editor Robert Hof about why that’s especially important today and whether enough investing is being done in core technologies such as computer science, networking, and semiconductors.

How have changes in technology altered the way you invest?
Starting a software company is now a lot cheaper and faster than it used to be, thanks to Amazon Web Services, open-source software, and the ability to build an app on iOS or Android. Speed to realizing a global opportunity is more critical competitively. I wanted to build out a [venture capital] platform that was appropriate to the modern age of entrepreneurship.

VCs have always provided help on networking and hiring. How is your platform different?

Think about how an application gets built on iOS. It calls up services on Apple’s platform, such as a graphics framework or how to create a dialog box. Similarly, a business gets built by hiring people, developing its product or service, growing its revenues. The modern venture firm needs to provide a set of services that the company can call upon. We have a dedicated team to recruit engineers and product people. We have more than a dozen communities of people from big Valley companies like Apple and Facebook focused on technical topics such as big data and user growth. They meet with our companies to teach things like growth hacking, the use of social media, and other low-cost alternatives for marketing.

“There are still billions of people coming online. Also, software is affecting almost every industry … And we’re just beginning to see how data informs everything.”

How long will these software-driven networks you’re focused on be good investing opportunities?

There are still billions of people coming online. Also, software is affecting almost every industry, from transportation, with Uber and self-driving cars, to personalized medicine, health, and genetics. And we’re just beginning to see how data informs everything. Those trends are in the very early innings, so they’re the ones that will have the macroeconomic impact over the next five to 10 years.

You’ve said you don’t think there’s a bubble in tech investing, but surely not all these upstarts are worth so much?

People are so exuberant about finding their way to the cutting-edge companies that valuations are going up across the board. Some companies are so massively valuable that even when you invest in them at an accelerated valuation, they’re still cheap in retrospect. But many companies are given [high] valuations when they actually shouldn’t be.

I don’t think higher valuations in private [venture capital fund-raising] rounds lead to a massive [public] market correction. A private down round [fund-raising that values the company at a lesser amount than the previous round] doesn’t destabilize the public capital markets. But it’s still pretty frothy. So when you’re seeing inflated valuations, you sit it out.

Have you been sitting out more often?
We’ve passed on many more deals in the past two years.

Is true innovation beyond slick apps being financed to the extent it should?
Markets tend to go toward realizable, short-term rewards that require little capital.

$10 billion
Value of Airbnb, a Hoffman investment, in its most recent fund-raising round

That tends to favor pure-play software companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, and Uber that have global reach and network effects [in which a service becomes much more valuable as more people use it]. If more capital naturally flowed toward deep tech, I think that would be a good thing for the world. But you do have SpaceX, you do have Tesla. Deep tech isn’t that starved for capital.

VC investing is way up, but the traditional exit, the IPO, often comes after a company has already grown quite large. As a result, public investors, as well as employees don’t share as much of the increase in value. Is that a problem?
It used to be, back in 1993–’96, tech companies would go public and then public market shareholders would benefit from the huge growth in valuations. Now it’s more the private investors who benefit. I don’t think that’s necessarily a problem.

Doesn’t that go against the idea that employee stock options and so on will democratize wealth, or at least spread it more broadly?
Ideally, you’d like to make the capital returns available to everybody, not just to the folks who can participate in these elite private funds or elite private financings. I’d rather have it democratized. But on the other hand, it makes complete sense from a company perspective to delay liquidity, because they can run much more efficiently as a private company and get as much momentum as possible.

“Big” Idea Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career

Late last year I wrote on this blog about my frustration with the lack of Big Ideas driving innovation. My rant was stimulated by a New York Times article on the grim underbelly of the “an app for everything” culture: people who were working on “small ideas,” and losing their shirts in the process. I also shared the thoughts of other entrepreneurial leaders, investors, and journalists, also bemoaning the fact that we seem to have lost our way, and are no longer thinking BIG. This morning I stumbled on a post on the HBR Blog Network, entitled “Idea Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career. I took some editorial license and added the word “Big” simply because the author was actually making the case for Big Ideas, and the hopeful sign that there may be a re-emergence of people who care about Big Ideas. Read my original post here, followed by today’s HBR Blog post.

“Big” Idea Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career

Reblogged from the HBR Blog Network

by John Butman | 10:00 AM May 27, 2013

They play many roles. They are manager, teacher, motivator, entertainer, coach, thought leader, and guru all rolled into one. Think Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn and author of The Start-Up of You), Daniel Pink (author of Drive) or, in India, Kiran Bedi, leader of a worldwide movement to transform prisons and root out corruption.

They create a platform of expressions and generate revenue to support their social activities. Idea entrepreneurs have to be exceptionally good at expressing their idea, and usually do so in many forms. They give private talks and major speeches, write books and blogs and articles, participate in panels and events, engage in social media — activities that can generate revenue (sometimes in considerable amounts), through a combination of fees, sales of their expressions, and related merchandise. Jim Collins has created a long-lasting enterprise supported by the sale of books and media, as well as fees for consulting, speaking engagements, and workshops.

They offer a practical way to understand and implement their idea. Because people have a hard time responding to an abstract idea, the idea entrepreneur develops practices (and personally models them, too) that lead people to the idea through action. Bryant Terry, an “eco-chef” who argues that good nutrition is the best path to social justice, embeds his ideas in cooking methods and suggestions for social interaction around good food.

They draw other people into their idea. The idea entrepreneur gathers people into the development, expression, and application of their idea. They form affiliations, build networks, and form groups. Al Gore created the Climate Reality Project Leadership Corps to bring his ideas about environmental sustainability to people around the world. Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual leader and author of The Power of Now, has established the online Eckhart Teachings Community with members in 130 countries. This inclusion of many people in many ways creates a phenomenon I call respiration— it’s as if the idea starts to breathe, and takes on a life of its own.

They drive the quest for change. It is all too common that people with an idea for an improvement or a change to the world are satisfied to point out a problem, propose a solution, and then expect others to execute. The idea entrepreneur, however, sees the expression of the idea as the beginning of the effort — and it can be a lifelong one — in which they will continue to build the idea, reach new audiences, and offer practices that lead to change. Dr. Bindeshwar Pathak, based in Delhi, believes that world-class sanitation is necessary for India to realize its full potential. In forty years of idea entrepreneurship — spent in writing, speaking, travelling, network building, and technology development — he has influenced the way millions of people think and act.

“Big” Idea Entrepreneur: The New 21st Century Career

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