systems entrepreneurship versus entrepreneurship
16 Apr 2017at dinner last week, casper introduced me to the idea of systems entrepreneurship.
game.
changed.
i immediately sent some articles (listed below) to ross because i think the ideas contained in this line of thinking have a lot to do with what we were working on and thinking about. i mentioned it at brunch with william and alex, too. i’m enamored.
i haven’t read that much about it, but the framework makes complete sense to me so far. essentially, systems entrepreneurship is the work of making systems change by taking a systems approach. even as i write that it sounds pretty vague, but i think it’s most helpful to think about as a foil to conventional entrepreneurship.
this image, imo, from this blog post explains everything perfectly.
the problem with entreprenurship is that the things needed for it are the opposite of things needed for systems change. that doesn’t mean that entrepreneurship isn’t needed; just that our hopes and dreams of changing systems via creating companies is doomed to fail.
in a way, this is just another way of approaching the idea that capitalism is fundamentally broken. i’m becoming more and more anti-capitalist every day it seems, but i digress…
last thought on this before my time is up: the value of seeing oneself as a systems entrepreneur is that you get to be freed from the constraints of the corporate world. you can use much of the same thinking (maybe?) and the same connections and stuff, but you just get to work totally differently. instead of trying to build one thing really well, you can think holistically and make progress by building different things built in different places. i have a very specific vision about how this could happen, but i’ll just leave it here for now.
articles
- Don’t build a start-up, become a systems entrepreneur
- Cultivating a New Generation of Leader: The System Entrepreneur
- The Dawn of System Leadership - Stanford Social Innovation Review
| writing | spell-check, link-finding, & formatting |
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