Richard Dasher of Stanford University directs the US-Asia Technology Management Center and is the Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Systems.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor out of Babson College does a yearly survey of 200,000 people world-wide to find out what percentage of the population is involved in entrepreneurship. They also assess attitudes of those NOT involved in entrepreneurship, and what holds them back.People & countries world-wide can be organized into three types of economies, depending on where they are in their development. These are:
1) Factor-Driven developmental economy: China, Thailand, sub-Saharan Africa all have very high levels of entrepreneurship to roll out basic services people need as urbanization grows. The basic strategy is to get to market first...and there is not a high level of technology and sophisticated post-graduate training. This phase seems to end when personal income reaches the equivalent of $15,000 US/year.
2) Efficiency-Driven economies: When the first wave of industry gets big, you then get people shortages. The focus now becomes getting good people and keeping good people.
The focus becomes: who can scale up the best? The companies saturate their domestic market, and go global.
After the first two phases of economic development (1) The Factor-Driven developmental economy and 2) The Efficiency-Driven economies), frustration spreads through the population, as the parents wish better for their children, and the new generation of workers want to change the world.
This leads to:
3) Innovation-Driven economies: The desire to improve the quality of life is juxtaposed with big companies that need to maintain growth. This leads to development of Open Innovation (aka Henry Chesbrough at UCBerkeley).
Invention and innovation is happening in small, lean start-up companies.
For instance, in Silicon Valley, people grow companies with an exit in mind, and Google buys 15-25 startup companies each year. Richard maintains that Tesla - an electric sports-car - would never have been developed by a major car company. Risk happens in the innovation atmosphere of small start-ups. People in the big companies are already busy doing what that company does.
Richard speaks of symbiotic relationships between centers of innovation and a bigger economy that buys the innovative output of these lean start-ups. It is a local phenomenon.
His further assertion: social entrepreneurship hasn't yet figured out an exit strategy or who will pick up their innovations to develop them. He considers this the next major challenge for social innovation and social entrepreneurs.
Richard Dasher, Executive Director of the Center for Integrated Studies, wraps up his presentation at the Franchise for Humanity, Stanford University, California Feb 20, 2014 with Questions and Answers.In his economics assessment, which has three phases (1) Factor-Driven developmental economy, 2) Efficiency-Driven economies and 3) Innovation-Driven economies), Richard Dasher believes that true success comes from the deep understanding of people.Interestingly, in Richard's estimation, family run businesses in Europe are exemplars for both sustainability and innovation.
He also addresses burn-out in social innovation and entrepreneurship, why big companies can't implement disruptive innovation, and the need for fluidity in the labor market.