Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Monday, July 14, 2003Why We Need Startups
Rich Karlgaard on Why We Need Startups (registration required):
Startups put the U.S. on a steeper learning curve. This is not an obvious point, yet it is crucial to understanding why startups make America dynamic...Every time a startup takes a risky chance and careens over the guardrail, something beneficial is learned.
The vast majority of promising startups operate in highly ambiguous environments that aren't amenable to the number-crunching expertise of large, established companies (or bureaucrats, for that matter). Simply put, there is little credible data to analyze. The best way to learn is to act. The resulting information and knowledge is quickly disseminated throughout the economy. As Thomas Edison might put it, learning the 50,000 things that don't work is essential to identifying the one thing that does.
