Metcalfe's 5-13-07 Insight: Ideas are a dime a dozen. Shortage = Entrepreneurs

In last week's blog, I reflected on the characteristics of individuals that CTOs would want to assign to an innovation team. In summary, the ideal profile defined by the CTOs included "superior technical skills" and the characteristics typically associated with an entrepreneur. (If you want to review the details, see last week's blog.) The power of this combination of special knowledge, skills and attitudes -- and the opportunity for engineers to differentiate themselves by developing this set of characteristics -- was reinforced in a lengthy interview with Bob Metcalfe in today's Boston Globe.

In the SEC documents filed when the company Metcalfe founded 3COM was going public identified him as "the principal inventor of Ethernet." He is now a partner in Polaris Venture Partners. Here's the relevant quote from the interview in response to the question: "Are you seeing lots of new inventions you can invest in?"

"Definitely. We're overrun with it. There is a limiting factor that prevents us from putting more money to work than we would otherwise, and that's a shortage of CEOs, entrepreneurial teams. The ideas and technologies, they're a dime a dozen."

During the time (1979-1983) that I was part of the co-founding team of Power Kinetics (an advanced solar technology company) and later (1988-1992) when I directed the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Incubator Program, this dilemma continually reared its ugly head. Great technologists and great technologies failed to get traction with investors and in the marketplace because of a lack of complementary entrepreneurial talent within the management team. I saw the same issue over and over again during our study of breakthrough innovation projects within Air Products, Analog Devices, Dupont, GE, GM, IBM, Nortel Networks, Polaroid, Texas Instruments, and United Technologies. (If you want to read about the insights from our longitudinal study of how these projects were managed, see:

http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml;jsessionid=ALVJG0D2X0IIIAKRGWDR5VQBKE0YIISW?id=9032&referral=2340

When I was a finalist for the Incubator Director position, I wrote an essay entitled: "Technical Entrepreneurs and Business Entrepreneurs", which focused on the need to develop a talent pool that includes leaders of both skill sets who can work together to create a successful venture. Although it's possible to find both skill sets in the same individual, it is more common to assemble a team in which outstanding technical entrepreneurs (innovative engineers) have sufficient business savvy and business entrepreneurs have sufficient technical savvy -- and they both have sufficient respect for each other -- that they can build a high-performing team.

This past week I hosted at Babson College a delegation of about a dozen senior people from EMC. There were two topics.

(1) EMC is exploring innovative ways to respond to the "World is Flat" phenomenon, including exploring the possibility of partnering with Babson's Glavin Center for Global Management and its global partners.

(2) Senior VP Joel Schwartz, who catalyzed the visit to Babson, is a champion for increasing the capacity of EMC leaders to drive and to manage innovation, and to that end, he was introducing them to Babson's Fast Track MBA as an opportunity for their own professional development as well as for high-performing members of their teams.

If you have had successes and difficulties in assembling and managing innovation teams and are willing to share your insights with fellow readers of this blog, please e-mail at mrice@babson.edu.

More to come next week….

Mark