Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Tuesday, November 04, 2003Echo Entrepreneurs?
Recently, Chris Gibbons wrote:
[D]emographic changes come in waves and the next immediate (next 10-20 years) wave will see a lot of baby boomers leave the work force and a lot of Echo Boomers enter the workforce—with a trough of Gen X’s in between ……but Echo Boomers will be at the entry level, not the seasoned senior level. Many of the new jobs are predicted to be technical in nature – the question will be whether the Echo Boomers can fill them quickly out of school.
Historically, being seasoned was, in most cases, a prerequisite for being a successful entrepreneur. I wonder, though...will the independent streak of Echo Boomers and the professionalization of entrepreneurship combine to create new career paths for younger people?
I've had the chance to observe the phenomenon in at least one case up close. Justin Bigart, a twenty-something with only a bit of corporate work experience, came to work with me 18 months ago in lieu of going back to school to get an MBA. Recently, Justin left full-time employment with me to be the cofounder of a new spa. The spa achieved breakeven its first week. Not bad for a newcomer.
The Rise of the Stupid Network - Take 2
A few years back, David Isenberg lit a fire within the heart of the telecom industry with an essay titled The Rise of the Stupid Network. In it, he predicted that intelligence must migrate from the center of the network to the edge. In too many cases, social networking software attempts to centralize intelligence, which requires that the center be smart enough to predict over time how the nodes of the network will use the software. However, the transformation of these new networks is already happening. As Seb Paquet writes, "Score one more for stupid software - software that doesn't presume to know what people will do with it." For an in-depth assessment of information technology in a social context, see Power to the Edge.