Important Questions Entrepreneurs Need to Ask
To launch your own great idea, you need to be able to answer these questions.
Most of us, when we get what we think of as a stable job, effectively plug into a solution someone else has devised, taken to market and brought to scale. We hire ourselves out on behalf of solutions for which someone else has found avid users, early backers and paying customers.
But at the present pace of global change, today’s solution is tomorrow’s problem. In my previous post, I assert that, due to accelerating rates of change in the way we live, the tools we use and the structure of global markets, it is increasingly risky to assume that existing solutions will provide stable sources of employment.
In view of this, I argue, an increasing proportion of us needs to learn to build out solutions ourselves, whether as entrepreneurs or on behalf of our employers, in order to help them stay relevant and keep our paychecks coming.
This requires that we learn to think and operate in a way that is unfamiliar to many of us who have been rewarded, throughout our education and our professional lives, for more or less doing what we’re told, in the way we’ve been told to do it.
To help aspiring entrepreneurs and corporate innovators learn this unfamiliar mode of thinking and operating, I use a set of questions. These questions reflect an approach my partners and I have developed through extensive work with entrepreneurs and corporate innovators over time.
Senior Consultant Alejandro Crawford on “Developing Entrepreneurial Students for the 21st Century Economy” – what it means for students to create solutions to emerging problems, instead of just applying formulas derived for yesterday’s world. Crawford’s remarks were delivered as part of the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s Entrepreneu