Creating a Sustainable Business
The word “entrepreneur,” of French origin, means one who “takes the between.” In my younger days, I viewed entrepreneurs as exploitative—business owners who opportunistically extracted value from an economic flow. But in fact, entrepreneurs can create the flow—or the channel in which the flow can run—by recognizing an opportunity and “taking the between.” By standing in the gap, entrepreneurs have the ability to invent opportunities that can only exist if someone… if someone does what?
The usual answer is “takes on a risk for the opportunity of a return.” Yet while entrepreneurs are commonly seen as risk takers, the best ones are actually risk mitigators: designers who create ways to get reliable results amid chaos and confusion. Entrepreneurs differ from inventors: The inventor’s task is to innovate, to create something unprecedented. The entrepreneur’s is to translate innovation into something reliable, replicable, consistently deliverable and economically viable…