Are Entrepreneurs the Inventors of 2020?
We, fortunately, live in a time today where almost every young person is aspiring to be an entrepreneur. Now I understand, there is a lot of wannabe-ism associated with this aspiration but for a moment, let’s let that be, what matters is that people are willing to create. The young people of today reject the ways of how things got done and are willing to take on the responsibility of creating something of value.
This is big, this is a massive societal shift which we will come to appreciate fully in 20 years from now as the fruits of the labour of these entrepreneurs would become apparent.
The inventors of yore used to create innovations often under the patronage of universities or endowments. The next logical step after creating something was patenting it and then moving on. Commercialization was someone else's headache.
What this meant was many innovations never saw the light of day and serve humanity since there was no one to take it to market. Let me give you an example, the Wright Brother’s created the first plane in 1903 however, it took another decade to fly a plane commercially. Same goes with antibiotics, penicillin was discovered in 1928, however, it took another decade before the first patient used it.
This is what has changed about the market today and all in all I believe it’s a good chance. Innovation is intended for the people rather than just as an academic pursuit. The inventors of today are the entrepreneurs, the ones who use the tools and technologies we have to create software and hardware to push us just a little bit further with each incremental improvement.
Let me give you one example of how entrepreneurs through their rapid inventing made our lives so much better. Imagine what the state of the world would have been had the Covid crisis hit us and we had no means to communicate through digital tech. If you reflect upon it, these technologies have hardly been around for a decade, all enabled through highspeed internet bandwidths & lightning fast systems. We were able to keep in touch despite physical distancing. Work to some degree continued, in fact, remote work might have improved many industries.
The approach towards entrepreneurship I would urge people to take is that of an inventor. Look at a problem worth solving, try to solve it in the best possible manner with the available tools, connect it to the market, get feedback and let the world use your creation. It’s a privilege of our generation to see our creations being used by millions all in our lifetime
Let’s reimagine the world we live in, make it slightly better, with our incremental innovations. This to me is the surest way of changing the world.
