Entrepreneurship – Page 184 – artdiamondblog.com

Making a Profit Selling Solid Houses to Citizens of New Orleans

“The Everhouse.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A9) Tomorrow, tens of thousands of people who lost their homes in Hurricane Katrina and are still living in federally owned trailers will be forced to find a new place to live. After nearly three years, the federal government’s temporary housing is coming to an end.

These folks are not going to have an easy time of it, because affordable housing in the Gulf Coast region is scarce. The problem has persisted despite billions in government aid – and the efforts of large private developers – because of a shortage of skilled laborers and sky-high insurance rates.

Yet now there is hope, in the person of John Sawyer. Not only does this 64-year-old Bostonian believe he can build houses people can afford to buy and insure; he says they will withstand the next big storm. And, by the way, he intends to makes a tidy profit.
. . .
The dwellings will arrive in the form of kits that can be assembled in as little as 14 days. With walls of reinforced concrete, there isn’t much wood, and so mold won’t pose a major problem if the houses are ever flooded. They can “take a bath” as the locals say. Everhouses also cost $68 a square foot, less than half the going rate for affordable housing in New Orleans.

The upshot of the house’s durability and cost is that it’s easy to insure.

For the full commentary, see:
JAKE HALPERN. “A Market Solution to Hurricane Risk.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., May 31, 2008): A9.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Schumpeter Claimed Entrepreneurial Gains Result in New Jobs

From McCraw’s summary of an article entitled “The Function of Entrepreneurs and the Interest of the Worker” that Schumpeter published in 1927 in a labor magazine :

(p. 178) Schumpeter’s key point here is one he hammered home many times: it is the insatiable pursuit of success, and of the towering premium it pays, that drives entrepreneurs and their investors to put so much of their time, effort, and money into some new project whose future is completely uncertain. High entrepreneurial returns are essential to generate gains not only for individuals but also for society, through the creation of new jobs.

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

Higher Prices to Operate Cars, Increases Demand for Segways

Using a Segway to deliver pizza. Source of photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B2) With gasoline prices and global warming on their minds, more Americans are getting out of their cars and riding to work — and riding on the job — on the once-maligned Segway.

Scott Hervey of Yorba Linda, Calif., bought one of the electric scooters on June 7 and has put 150 miles on it commuting to his custodian’s job at Disneyland, about 12 miles away. He had considered buying a Segway for four years, and gasoline prices finally drove him to do it. Now he “glides,” as Segway enthusiasts say, to work. “I like passing gas stations,” says the 54-year-old.
The two-wheeled Segway, a self-balancing vehicle that runs on a rechargeable battery, debuted amid massive hype in 2001. Tech icons like Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.’s chief executive officer, and Amazon.com Inc. CEO Jeff Bezos predicted it would change the way people lived. But critics panned the high-tech scooter for its $5,000 price tag and portrayed it as a toy for geeks and the rich. Some cities banned it from sidewalks because of safety concerns.
Today, the Segway is gaining converts. It plugs into a standard electrical outlet and can get up to 25 miles per charge.
Sales at the scooter’s maker, Segway Inc., have risen to an all-time high, says CEO Jim Norrod. The closely held Manchester, N.H., company doesn’t release detailed numbers. (A September 2006 recall showed the company had sold 23,500 Segways.) But Mr. Norrod says he expects sales this quarter to jump 50% from a year earlier, versus a 25% year-over-year increase in the first quarter.

For the full story, see:
STU WOO. “Segway Glides as Gasoline Jumps; Maligned Scooter Winning New Fans; $5,000 Price Tag.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 16, 2008): B2.

More on Dyslexia and Entrepreneurship

For the full story, see:

JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG. “Running the Show; Me, Me, Me; So many entrepreneurs are writing books about how they made it. Their books, though, aren’t nearly as successful.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., June 16, 2008): R7.
(Note: ellipses added.)

Source of book image: http://www.paulorfalea.com/downloads/CopyThis_1.jpg

(p. R7) Some entrepreneurial titles are written — and resonate with readers — for more personal reasons.

Paul Orfalea, the founder of Kinko’s, says he wrote his book, “Copy This!: Lessons from a Hyperactive Dyslexic Who Turned a Bright Idea Into One of America’s Best Companies,” because he wanted parents of kids with dyslexia to know that their children could succeed in life.
Workman Publishing, an independent publisher based in New York, initially printed 35,000 copies in 2005. Today, after two additional printings, there are 50,000 hardcovers in print. A paperback edition was published in March 2007, with a reworked title.

Among Academic Economists Interest in Entrepreneurship is “A Quick Ticket Out of a Job”

From McCraw’s discussion of Schumpeter’s “legacy”:

(p. 500) In the new world of academic economics, neither the Schumpeterian entrepreneur as an individual nor entrepreneurship as a phenomenon attracts much attention. For professors in economics departments at most major universities, particularly in the United States and Britain, a focus on these favorite issues of Schumpeter’s has become a quick ticket out of a job. This development arose from a self-generated isolation of academic economics from history, sociology, and the other social sciences. It represented a trend that Schumpeter himself had glimpsed and lamented but that accelerated rapidly during the two generations after his death.

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

Hospitals Lack Hospitality

Source of book image: http://www.simplenomics.com/wp-images/settingthetable-1.jpg

(p. R7) Most successful entrepreneurs like rattling on about how they did it.

The bookshelves have never been more crowded with such exploits from consultants, real-estate moguls and retailers. And publishers say there are more on the way. With layoffs and cutbacks dominating the headlines, demand for advice books based on true-life stories is peaking.
. . .
So what does it take to succeed?
“Pragmatic advice, [a book written by] somebody with a fairly high public profile, and a person who can hit the lecture circuit after the first rush of publicity and keep the book selling,” says Grand Central’s Mr. Wolff.
Those factors have contributed to the staying power of restaurateur Danny Meyer’s book, “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business.”
News Corp.’s HarperCollins Publishers first published 30,000 copies in October 2006. (News Corp. also publishes The Wall Street Journal.) Mr. Meyer’s work, chatty personal anecdotes wrapped around a core message that emphasizes hospitality as the key to creating satisfied customers, proved a hit.
. . .
“The most surprising thing was the interest from the hospital community,” Mr. Meyer says. “That’s an industry in turmoil based on the absence of hospitality. They over-focus on the metrics of stays and cure rates rather than how they make people feel.”

Schumpeter’s Name Forever Linked to Entrepreneurship

From McCraw’s discussion of Schumpeter’s “legacy”:

(p. 496) Because of the importance of entrepreneurship, and because Schumpeter wrote about it with such insight and verve, his name will be forever linked to the idea.

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.

New Entrepreneurs Are Encouraged by Good Examples

Source of graphic: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B7) One day during Trip Adler’s sophomore year at Harvard University, he saw fellow undergraduates Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz outside their dormitory with suitcases and boxes. When Mr. Adler asked what the two — who happened to be Facebook Inc.’s co-founders — were doing, Mr. Moskovitz lightly replied that they were moving from Cambridge, Mass., to Silicon Valley “to make Facebook big.”
“I was so jealous,” recalls Mr.Adler, now 23 years old. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to find an idea and drop out of Harvard.'”
Mr. Adler didn’t leave school, but after graduating in 2006, he did start an online document-sharing company. San Francisco-based Scribd Inc., employs 12 people and attracts 11.1 million monthly visitors, according to Web-tracking company comScore Inc. It has raised nearly $3.9 million from Redpoint Ventures and other venture-capital and individual investors.
Mr. Adler is just one of the Harvard students who have caught start-up fever since Facebook, founded when Mr. Zuckerberg was at Harvard in 2004, exploded in popularity. Other recent Harvard-born start-ups include Internet companies Kirkland North Inc., Drop.io Inc. and Labmeeting Inc. And Facebook has become a model for these start-ups on many fronts, from the look of company Web sites to their corporate strategies.

For the full story, see:
VAUHINI VARA. “ENTERPRISE; Facebook Ignites Entrepreneurial Spirit at Harvard Students, Graduates Start Firms, Using The Site as a Model.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., May 20, 2008): B7.

Venter’s Use of ESTs “Leapfrogged” his X-Chromosome Proposal

(p. 82) Venter dubbed the fragments “expressed sequence tags,” or ESTs for short.
. . .
Venter was ecstatic. He had veered wildly off course from his approved plan of research, but the risk had paid off. While the Human Genome Project grant committee was still dragging its feet over his X-chromosome proposal, he had already leapfrogged ahead of that idea and found a way to go forward even faster, using his ESTs. Venter wrote Watson to let him know what he was up to, hoping to win his approval and some funding to continue the EST project.

Reference to book:
Shreeve, James. The Genome War: How Craig Venter Tried to Capture the Code of Life and Save the World. 1st ed. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

At Pixar, “Storytelling is More Important Than Graphics”

Source of book image:
http://bp2.blogger.com/_Sar8IPNlxOY/SClPS33oTxI/AAAAAAAAB_0/B8GjajHtetY/s1600/PixarTouch.jpg

(p. A19) One of Mr. Catmull’s other inspirations was to hire computer animator John Lasseter after he was fired by Walt Disney Co. in 1983. (He had apparently stepped on one too many toes in the company’s sprawling management structure.) Then again, as Mr. Price reports, in the world of computer animators, workplace comings and goings seemed to be part of the job. Mr. Lasseter himself had already quit Disney and then returned before being fired. In the creative ferment of computer animation in the late 1970s and early 1980s, what mattered most was the work itself: Never mind who signs the paychecks – what project are you working on now?
. . .
One of Pixar’s first projects revealed a truth that would point the way to success: Storytelling is more important than graphics firepower. The company created a short film, directed by Mr. Lasseter, called “Tin Toy,” about a mechanical one-man band fleeing the terrors of a baby who wants to play with it. “Tin Toy” made audiences laugh in part because it turned established themes on their heads. The story was told from the toy’s-eye view, close to the floor. The baby, doing what babies do, seemed like a gigantic, capricious monster. “Tin Toy” won the 1988 Academy Award for animated short film.
The upside-down “Tin Toy” point of view seems to fit much of what happened at Pixar afterward. The company made a deal with Disney in 1991: The little animation outfit would produce three movies, and the entertainment behemoth would distribute and market them. With the outsize success of the first movie in the deal, “Toy Story” – it grossed $355 million world-wide – Pixar and Disney were perhaps on an inevitable collision course over control and profits. Mr. Price adroitly depicts the clashes between Mr. Jobs and his nemesis at Disney, chief executive Michael Eisner, and captures the sweet vindication of Mr. Lasseter as the projects he guides outstrip the animation efforts of his former employer.
The sweetest moment in the Pixar saga came two years ago, when Disney bought the company for $7.4 billion in an all-stock deal – one that gave Pixar executives enormous power at their new home. Mr. Jobs sits on the Disney board and is the company’s largest shareholder. (Mr. Eisner left in 2005.) And Mr. Lasseter became the chief creative officer for the combined Disney and Pixar animation studios, where Mr. Catmull serves as president.
The day after the sale was announced, Mr. Lasseter and Mr. Catmull flew to Burbank, Calif., to address a crowd of about 500 animation staffers on a Disney soundstage. “Applause built as they made their way to the front,” Mr. Price reports, “and then erupted again in force” when the two men were introduced. “Lasseter was welcomed as a rescuer of the studio from which he had been fired some twenty-two years before.” In one of their first moves, Mr. Price says, Messrs. Lasseter and Catmull “brought back a handful of Disney animation standouts who had only recently been laid off.” Redemption, after all, is essential to any story well told.

For the full review, see:

PAUL BOUTIN. “Bookshelf, An Industry Gets Animated.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., May 14, 2008): A19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Schumpeter’s Final Thoughts on the Importance of the Individual Entrepreneur

Here is McCraw discussing and quoting Schumpeter’s notes for the Walgreen Lectures that he was preparing to deliver just before he died.

(p. 475) In notes he prepared in 1949 for the prestigious Walgreen Lectures, Schumpeter headed one entire section “The Personal Element and the Element of Chance: A Principle of Indeterminateness.” Here, he wrote that the time had come for economists to face a problem they had long tried to dodge:

the problem of the influence that may be exerted by exceptional individuals, a problem that has hardly ever been treated without the most blatant preconceptions. Without committing ourselves either to hero worship or to its hardly less absurd opposite, we have got to realize that, since the emergence of exceptional indi-(p. 476)viduals does not lend itself to scientific generalization, there is here an element that, together with the element of random occurrences with which it may be amalgamated, seriously limits our ability to forecast the future. That is what is meant here by “a principle of indeterminateness.” To put it somewhat differently: social determinism, where it is nonoperational, is a creed like any other and entirely unscientific.

Source:
McCraw, Thomas K. Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2007.