Name: Innovation and Entrepreneurship
ISBN: 9780887306181

Innovation and Entrepreneurship

The first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as purposeful and systematic discipline which explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. A superbly practical book that explains what established businesses, public survey institutions, and new yentures have to know, have to learn, and have to do in today's economy and marketplace.

What Hacker News says

lkrubnerFeb 2020

As an antidote, I'd like to recommend Peter F. Drucker's 1985 book, "Innovation and Entrepreneurship":

https://www.amazon.com/Innovation-Entrepreneurship-Peter-F-D...

Drucker was a critic of the idea that small firms are more innovative than large firms. He provides a wealth of innovation about the styles of innovation that large firms produce.

About this:

"But there’s a more troubling possibility. Maybe something has changed about the nature of innovation, at least in software."

When was this era? From the 1940s to the early 1980s, software development was mostly done at big firms such as IBM and Hewlett Packard. The rise of the personal computer allowed a wave of software firms, such as Microsoft and Adobe, to get going, but even then, the costs of getting such a startup going was much higher than now. The era of the really cheap software startup was basically the era of the CRUD app moved to the Web, basically 1995 to 2015, give or take a few years on either side. My point is, that era is more the exception than the rule, given the history of the industry.

It seems melodramatic to claim that a specific culture was lost, though it is absolutely true that the industry has matured and therefore the situation has changed. We are unlikely to see any more startups come out of Silicon Valley and become huge like Microsoft or Adobe or Google or Facebook.

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lkrubnerNov 2017

I'd recommend Peter Drucker's book from 1985, "Innovation And Entrepreneurship".

Drucker points out that the output of a small startup is radically different from a large, mature organization. From a large organization, investors might want growth of 15% and final profits of 20%. But he also points out, this is both too little and too much for a small startup. From an early stage organization, it is important to see triple digit growth, and no profits at all. The sign of a successful startup is that it finds a business model that allows it to grow rapidly. Drucker also describes the failure mode where the small startup gets enough growth to survive, but not enough to become a mature, independent organization. It then limps along in a crippled state.

For my money, Drucker has a better density of insight-per-page than any other business writer. I strongly recommend him.

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lkrubnerMar 2017

It is absolutely fascinating to look at the explosion of books, both self-help and entrepreneurial, that started in the 1980s and continues to this day. Some of those books are very good, and worth reading (my favorite, is Drucker's 1985 book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship"). Some of the self-help books are useful to salespeople (a good interview technique, when hiring salespeople, is to ask them the last 3 self-help books they've read. If they haven't read any, then they are not serious about sales).

Many of these books are complete garbage. But there are a lot of them.

The fascinating thing is how much this explosion of exciting rhetoric coincides with a sad and darkening reality, as described in sources such as these:

"The Surprising Slowdown in Startups"

http://fortune.com/2016/03/18/startup-growth-stagnation/

What if the conventional view of startups and entrepreneurship in the U.S. turns out, like so many conventional views, to be wrong? Substantial recent research suggests that it is. So brace yourself for decidedly counterintuitive findings that may help explain some of our era’s economic puzzles. First surprise: Startups aren’t increasing in the U.S. On the contrary, entrepreneurship has been declining for decades. The startup rate has fallen sharply over the past 30 or so years, from 14% of total companies in a given year to about 8%, say multiple papers by researchers Ryan Decker of the Federal Reserve Board, John Haltiwanger of the University of Maryland, and Ron S. Jarmin and Javier Miranda of the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s bad news because the rise of new companies is an important way in which capital and labor get reallocated from low-productivity uses to high-productivity uses. But this bad news gets worse.

And also:

http://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-businesses-economic...

Startup rates, or the share of all companies formed within the past year, had exceeded closure rates every year since at least the 1970s — even during recessions. That all came to a halt in 2008 with the economic downturn. While it’s normal for growth to diminish somewhat during economic recoveries, it has been slower than usual: There were still 182,000 fewer businesses in 2014 than in 2007, according to the report.

Falling startup rates aren’t just confined to a few industries. All major sectors of the economy experienced gradual declines.

The slowdown in the formation of new businesses has led to what the report calls a “golden age of incumbency,” with a larger share of Americans working for well-established companies than ever before.

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sergiosgcOct 2016

It was actually expectable. I read Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker back when we were living the first bubble, and it is amazing how much the dot-com bubble followed previous technology disruption bubbles.

The book seriously predates the dot-com bubble. It does not mention it. It's just that it perfectly fitted the events back then, and still does; something that is a hallmark of quality.

According to Drucker, a first boom and crash is followed by a more shallow boom and slowdown, and then the tech is absorbed into everyday life and causes no more large market fluctuations.

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lancewiggsMar 2015

And Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship a bit latter that decade. I recommend all of them and also Porter's 5 forces update article in HBR.

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davidwDec 2013

Looking through my list, none jumps out as a 'life changer':

http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/

Although there are several good ones there:

* Nathan Barry's Authority: http://blog.liberwriter.com/2013/11/21/nathan-barrys-authori...

* Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/09/worthless-imp... - not one for the ages, but I thought his take on entrepreneurship was interesting.

* http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/08/pathfinder-jo... - biography of John Fremont. Interesting guy in an interesting period of American history.

* http://davids-book-reviews.blogspot.it/2013/02/innovation-an... - Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Drucker. Still a very relevant book in a lot of ways.

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