I ran across this amusing post by Erin Murphy, who blogs about innovation on her re-discovery of our first book together The Entrepreneurial Mindset. The book does suggest that uncertainty needn’t be an enemy, and provides tools for thinking about how to create opportunity when things seem to be going haywire around you.
It also made me reflect on an interesting question I was asked by an Economist web editor today, about the difference between innovation and entrepreneurial thinking. To me, innovation covers a vast range of possibile ways that people come up with new things – ideas, products, technologies, discoveries, and so on. Entrepreneurship, on the other hand, is how you turn innovations into a business that creates customers. It’s quite easy to confuse the two. I also wonder about companies who claim they want to be more innovative, when I think they really want to be more entrepreneurial.