Innovation And Entrepreneurship: Practice and Principles

　　詹宏志曾說，在杜拉克寫了這本書後，實在沒有需要其他談論創新的書籍，本書為探討創新的經典。(文/費濟斯)

Peter Drucker's classic book on innovation and entrepreneurship

This is the first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as a purposeful and systematic discipline that explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. Superbly practical, Innovation and Entrepreneurship explains what established businesses, public service institutions, and new ventures need to know and do to succeed in today's economy.

作者簡介

　　Peter F. Drucker is considered the most influential management thinker ever. The author of more than twenty-five books, his ideas have had an enormous impact on shaping the modern corporation. Drucker passed away in 2005.

Chapter One

Systematic Entrepreneurship

＂The entrepreneur,＂ said the French economist J. B. Say around 1800, ＂shifts economic resources out of an area of lower and into an area of higher productivity and greater yield.＂ But Says definition does not tell us who this ＂entrepreneur＂ is. And since Say coined the term almost two hundred years ago, there has been total confusion over the definitions of ＂entrepreneur＂ and ＂entrepreneurship.＂



In the United States, for instance, the entrepreneur is often defined as one who starts his own, new and small business. Indeed, the courses in ＂Entrepreneurship＂ that have become popular of late in American business schools are the linear descendants of the course in starting ones own small business that was offered thirty years ago, and in many cases, not very different.



But not every new small business is entrepreneurial or represents entrepreneurship.



The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture.



McDonalds, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is ＂value＂ to the customer?), standardizing the ＂product,＂ designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonalds both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.



Equally entrepreneurial is the growing foundry started by a husband and wife team a few years ago in Americas Midwest, to heat-treat ferrous castings to high-performance specifications-for example, the axles for the huge bulldozers used to clear the land and dig the ditches for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska. The science needed is well known; indeed, the company does little that has not been done before. But in the first place the founders systematized the technical information: they can now punch the performance specifications into their computer and get an immediate printout of the treatment required. Secondly, the founders systematized the process. Few orders run to more than half a dozen pieces of the same dimension, the same metallic composition, the same weight, and the same performance specifications. Yet the castings are being produced in what is, in effect, a flow process rather than in batches, with computer-controlled machines and ovens adjusting themselves.



Precision castings of this kind used to have a rejection rate of 30 to 40 percent; in this new foundry, 90 percent or more are flawless when they come off the line. And the costs are less than two-thirds of those of the cheapest competitor (a Korean shipyard), even though the Midwestern foundry pays full American union wages and benefits. What is ＂entrepreneurial＂ in this business is not that it is new and still small (though growing rapidly). It is the realization that castings of this kind are distinct and separate; that demand for them has grown so big as to create a ＂market niche＂; and that technology, especially computer technology, now makes possible the conversion of an art into a scientific process.



Admittedly, all new small businesses have many factors in common. But to be entrepreneurial, an enterprise has to have special characteristics over and above being new and small. Indeed, entrepreneurs are a minority among new businesses. They create something new, something different; they change or transmute values.