Sunday, April 05, 2009

Kathy Eisenhardt, co-director of Stanford Technology Ventures Program and professor in Management Science and Engineering, talks about research in understanding entrepreneurship. She describes several key strategy aspects that can help a startup to be very successful, including team composition, market selection, fundraising approaches, working with the media, execution, balance between structure and ambiguity, and etc.
She specifically mentions that to get the media interested in your company you have to have a good story. The story doesn't have to be true, though. Whatever creates positive attention is good for the business.

Creativity, personal brilliance, deep dives, brainstorms, epihpanies make exellent stories. Great entrepreneurs and inventors, like Edison, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs and others, had been really good at exploiting this media bias. Probably, that is why the general public's view of innovation work is so distorted ( e.g. see Fundamental Attribution Error). Inventing a good technology helps. Putting a good story around it rules. We should be able to use the Three Magicians technique to help inventors with story development tasks.

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