First published on the Cleantech Investor website, January 2012
Elisabeth Jeffries learns about enterprise, from the masters
Soul-searching. Tormented by demons. Chippy.
Not the most promising qualities in a prospective PR manager perhaps, but ideal in an entrepreneur. And the Scots have them in bundles. That, at least, is the conviction of Bill Aulet, MD of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center in Cambridge, Massachussetts. Bill blasted into Edinburgh earlier this month from across the Atlantic alongside a couple of other big cheeses, to yank some fire out of the bellies of Scottish entrepreneurs (OK and a few Dutch, Spanish, Italian and, er, English).
We were here, at the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Innovation, to learn about enterprise from the masters: Bill, his colleague Ken Morse, serial entrepreneur and founding MD of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, and last but not least Professor Joe Lassiter, chair of Harvard University’s Innovation Lab. These are no dry academics; all got their hands dirty decades ago, making millions in the process. And they were here on one of the toughest missions of all – to help us make billions out of clean energy. The question is, can a future Rockefeller be bred or is he made that way?
Bill, a basketball player whose role models include Buddhist Steve Jobs and Eva Peron (“her immigrant mentality was what drove her on” he says), insists that the Scots already have exactly the right ingredients. As a successful entrepreneur from the world’s most innovative country, he should know, shouldn’t he? Bill is modest on the issue:
“Whenever someone says that you’re the leader in innovation and entrepreneurialism you have to worry. If you feel you’re the best at something you feel a sense of entitlement that prevents you from having that angst that makes you innovate.”
The best enterprise, he suggests, comes from a nagging drive for improvement:
“The ones who are the best in entrepreneurship and innovation have an angst, an uncomfortable feeling about them...a feeling they have to do something. Great entrepreneurs are kind of troubled...and when you talk about the Scottish, they have more of that hustling mentality, a feeling that we don’t have this or that.”
His travels have allowed him to sniff entrepreneurs out of the furthest reaches of Europe. Among the most promising newcomers to entrepreneurial capitalism, he indicates, are the fiery Romanians. And perhaps among the least recognised are the Finns, pioneers of mobile phones.
“If you ask the Russians if they’re entrepreneurial, they say yes, yes, yes they know all about it and they’ll start teaching it to you. If you ask the same question to the Finns, they’ll say we’re not that successful, we’re sorry you should think that, we really don’t have any options, we’re just trying to get by – and yet they are entrepreneurial.”
Time for a trip to Finland?
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