Restatement of the challenges for sustainable abundance

"The purpose of all these suggestions is to end industrialism as we know it. Industrialism is over, in fact; the question remains how we organize the economy that follows. Either it falls in on us, and crushes civilization, or we reconstruct it and unleash the imagination of a more sustainable future into our daily acts of commerce."..."It also means doing something now. It means trying things that may fail. It means shaking up city hall. It means electing people who actually want to make things work, who can imagine a better world. It means writing to companies and telling them what you think. It means never forgetting that the cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism. We don't have to buy products that destroy or from companies that harm or are unresponsive. If we want businesses to express a full range of social and environmental values in their daily commercial activities, then we, too, will have to express a full range of values and respond to the presence or absence of principle by how we act in the marketplace. It may mean being obstreperous or conciliatory, and knowing when to be which. To go back to our nature can also mean becoming 'sour, astringent, crabbed, unfertilized, unpruned, tough, resilient, and every spring shockingly beautiful in bloom.' It may mean a meticulous reinventorying of our lives, and our country. It will mean, in the words of Vaclav Havel, trying harder to “understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality from the inside, through personal experience.” It is time to clean out the closet, both conceptually and materially, and to reexamine our priorities and beliefs. We can't wait until the guardians wake up, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to wake them up. We cannot wait for business to set a new course. We have to educate our businesses, and, wherever appropriate, let them educate us." (Hawken, 1993. pp212-213)

Entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve University

I have just spent the better part of a week attending a seminar at Case Western Reserve on Entrepreneurship, taught by Dr. Scott Shane. This is a seminar sponsored by the Kauffman foundation.

The materials and presentation were first rate. Over 40 articles and materials were reviewed over the five day period, so it was quite an intensive program.

It is clear from the seminar discussions that the academic field of entrepreneurship is a cross functional area where the empirical techniques used for evaluations draw heavily from economics, finance and the social sciences. The current academic efforts appear to be focused on analysis of the opportunity and decision-making process of the entrepreneur, with less focus on the character or personality of the individual entrepreneur.

It appears that many of my ideas on the influence of global information networks, and the hypothesis that an emphasis on sustainable enterprise can increase the opportunity for entrepreneurship, are on target. An emphasis on the triple bottom line increases the complexity and social pressures of markets. This increases the complexity of the opportunities, and therefore creates market spaces where the entrepreneur can create value through control of complexity. This will increase efficiency for customers and provide value for the entrepreneur.  This is in complete alignment with Schumpeterian thought on destruction and disruption creating new opportunities in capitalistic markets.

As far as defining entrepreneurship, I came away with the idea that entrepreneurship can occur anywhere within the innovation, capitalization, or firm founding aspects of the business process. I do believe however that entrepreneurship only occurs when someone risks something to push a new idea into the marketplace, be it an idea that benefits an internal market or the external market.

This leads to examination on the question of how leadership enters into the question of entrepreneurship. Does taking risks and evaluating risk leadership? Are there entrepreneurs that are not leaders? Are there leaders that are not entrepreneurs?

Greater knowledge leads to more questions.