Expand Your Mind: 5 Stories of Innovation
by Miki Saxon
What does it take to be an entrepreneur? According to Anthony Tjan, Founder/CEO of venture firm Cue Ball, you need to be an architect (big-picture planning), storyteller (research and selling), and disciplinarian (executing).
It is easy to get caught up in the day-to-day and endless hours, and you often forget that running really hard does not necessarily equate with running in the right direction.
It doesn’t always start with a formal business plan or even with a specific idea. Innovation strikes in different ways as you will see.
Robert Croak is CEO of Silly Bandz, the hottest new kid craze.
Croak is an opportunist who has found the greatest opportunity of his life. “I’m the luckiest guy alive right now. I don’t think you’re going to find anyone who has a reason to be happier than I am,” he says. “I have the hottest toy, the hottest fashion product on earth. All the right people like Silly Bandz. Everyone asks who my publicist is. I don’t have one. We don’t advertise. All we do is viral marketing. This is happening on its own.”
Tod Dykstra, founder of Streetline Networks, watched cars circling the block in San Francisco looking for cheap parking.
Streetline’s system lets parking authorities identify crowded streets and jack up parking-meter rates block by block. The idea is to encourage drivers to stop circling and get off the streets—either paying for a municipal garage or heading to a less crowded neighborhood. San Francisco and Los Angeles are now installing Streetline technology.
Many people believe that entrepreneurs are all risk takers with a horror of working for large companies, but that isn’t true. What is true is that they go through many of the same efforts and traumas as the more traditional ones.
Gary Martz is a senior product manager at Intel, who proves that the three skills Tjan describes are just as applicable in-house as outside.
Intel nearly killed off WiDi… “They literally laughed me out of the room.”
Anil Duggal, a physical chemist at GE’s research labs, had to go to the Feds for funding when Jack Welch was GE’s boss, but it was a different story when Jeff Immelt took over.
First, Duggal had to develop a genius for getting funded. The idea of manufacturing lighting with a method akin to newspaper printing was a tough sell. In the late ’90s, he managed to buttonhole U.S. Energy Dept. officials visiting GE to look in on other projects. The $1 million grant that resulted helped keep the project going. Then in 2001, Jeff Immelt, still new in the role of CEO, challenged GE engineers and scientists to strive for breakthrough ideas. Today, OLED and LED research get about half of GE’s R&D budget for lighting.
As you can see, a common thread that runs through these stories is that entrepreneurs see things differently from the rest of us. They see what is and needs to be, or should be, or could be.
Ben Huh saw the potential of a site called I Can Has Cheezburger, raised some money and $10K of his own savings to buy it and then used the concept to create the 53 sites that make up Cheezburger Network.
“It was a white-knuckle decision,” he said. “I knew that the first site was funny, but could we duplicate that success?”
Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/
