From “Innovation and Entrepreneurship” by Peter F. Drucker
Successful entrepreneurs do not wait until “the Muse kisses them” and gives them a “bring idea”: they go to work. Altogether, they do not look for the “biggie,” the innovation that will “revolutionize the industry,” create a billion-dollar business,” or “make one rich overnight.” Those entrepreneurs who start out with the idea that they’ll make it big – and in a hurry – can be guaranteed failure. They are almost bound to do the wrong things. An innovation that looks very big may turn out to be nothing but technical virtuosity; and innovations with modest intellectual pretensions, a McDonald’s, for instance, may turn into gigantic, highly profitable businesses. The same applies to nonbusiness, public=service innovations.
Successful entrepreneurs, whatever their individual motivation – be it money, power, curiosity, or the desire for fame and recognition – try to create value and to make a contribution. Still, successful entrepreneurs aim high. They are not content simply to improve on what already exists, or to modify it. They try to create new and different values and new and different satisfactions, to convert a “material” into a “resource,” or to combine existing resources in a new and more productive configuration.
And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation.
As a rule, these are changes that have already occurred or are under way. The overwhelming majority of successful innovations exploit change. To be sure, there are innovations that in themselves constitute a major change; some of the major technical innovations, such as the Wright Brothers’ airplane, are examples. But these are exceptions, and fairly uncommon ones. Most successful innovations are far more prosaic; they exploit change. And thus the discipline of innovation (and it is the knowledge base of entrepreneurship) is a diagnostic discipline: a systematic examination of the areas of change that typically offer entrepreneurial opportunities.