I listened to David Heinemeier Hansson’s podcast titled “Unlearn Your MBA” a couple days ago, provided by Stanford’s Entrepreneurship Corner and it really struck a chord with a lot of the thoughts I’ve had regarding entrepreneurship.
Title: Innovation and Entrepreneurship
Author: Peter F. Drucker
Topics: Innovation, Ideation
You should read if: you want a systematic approach to developing new product and service concepts.
Description: Maybe it was the context of my life at the time, but when I read this book, I was blown away, I felt like I’d found a gold mine. When I was reading this book I was working in a product planning role in an established, medium sized company and struggling to find appropriate new product concepts for the division. My group was attempting to create a systematic ideation process to incorporate into the division’s best practices. It was a struggle! When we mapped out the origination of our best ideas, they seemed to come from random sources. When we analyzed why concepts we expected to be great failed, we did not come to an actionable conclusions on how to better evaluate concepts. Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship provides excellent insight into both of these issues. In this book, Mr. Drucker identifies and describes the seven most likely sources of new concepts, and ranks them in their likelihood of succeeding. He supports this by explaining how established companies struggle with new concepts because of their mature and often inflexible practices, and also presents some ideas on how to structure a new concepts group within an established company to allow exciting new concepts to flourish. The book is well written, an easy read, and provides real and rational guidance on identifying and developing new concepts.
Title: Inside the Tornado
Author: Geoffrey A. Moore
Topics: Strategy, Customer segmentation, Rapid-cycle learning
You should read if: you are planning to, or are in the process of, launching a new to the market product.
Description: In this follow on to the excellent book Crossing the Chasm
, Mr. Moore provides an excellent description of the changing dynamics of a venture as it crosses the chasm between early adopter and the early majority. He begins with a recap of the topics in Crossing the Chasm, explaining the trust dynamics between the segments that cause the chasm, and providing tools to help bridge this gap. He then contrasts the business focus of product variation and rapid cycle learning of the pre-chasm business with the operational focus of the post-chasm business, where the focus is on “shipping it”. Overall this book holds a lot of ideas and frameworks that can help a new venture succeed in gaining early adopters, crossing into the early majority, and surviving and driving the torrid demand that a successful venture will encounter.