"There is a great excitement in creating something new, seeing the next opportunity and trying to capture it," says Beck. "For a real entrepreneur, the money is secondary - the primary motivation is the challenge." -Peter Beck, entrepreneur profiled in Profit magazine, 2001
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Dear all,
I'm working on a paper that examines market incongruities (e.g. Drucker, 1985), and the resolutions (or ultimately entrepreneurial problems or inventive solutions) that entrepreneurs formulate and then choose to tackle in order to resolve or respond to incongruities.
Specifically, I'm looking for anecdotes of entrepreneurs who (foolishly?) choose to tackle the more challenging or difficult problems (reflected by quotes such as the one above), in spite of the fact that the simpler problem (that addresses the same market incongruity) had in fact been made known to them already. I'm particularly looking for published accounts of such decision-making (e.g. in the popular press), but after examining a variety of different popular press databases, this kind of publicized admission appears to be uncommon. Many interviewed entrepreneurs (including serial ones) quite naturally appear to frame or take pride in failure due to ambition, rather than frame and admit failure due to foolishness.
Ideally, the anecdotes would relate to such entrepreneurial decision-making in spite of economic 'opportunity costs' (e.g. those knowledgeable enough to reasonably tackle challenging problems may also be the ones that have opportunity costs high enough where somehow the simpler problems don't deserve their resources) or imitation considerations (e.g. entrepreneurs may not want to tackle simple problems because they perceive that the emergent solutions can be readily imitated by others).
Any thoughts or leads are certainly appreciated.
-Chihmao.
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Dr. Chihmao Hsieh
Assistant Professor
Department of Business and Information Technology
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Missouri</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> of Science & Technology
email: hsiehc at mst dot edu
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