From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In India affordability and improving life are also key pillars of entrepreneurship- coming from the circumstances and context of the country; for example, India has 1,000 radiologists for a population of 1.4 billion.
I would even say that people really don't oppose new technologies but they question the way they are used so the challenges are more social than they are technological.
There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. A century ago, information was expensive to acquire and move- bureaucracy was a logical way of bringing information together. The world simply doesn't work like that anymore.
Technologies are emerging and moving so fast, that it's very hard to build accountability mechanisms; not least because technologies can become ubiquitous before we understand them.
We can now, more accurately than ever before, view the transactions occurring within our system, identifying the originator(s), beneficiary(ies) and intermediaries along the chain.
We adopted in Portugal a National Strategy for Entrepreneurship: Startup Portugal. A strategy that aims to make Portugal the ideal space to create, test, fail and try again.
The single best way to have a great idea is to produce lots of ideas. The number of new ideas your organization can produce is a metric for its ability to generate novel solutions to any given problem. Your ideaflow is the most crucial business metric that you've never considered.
My entry into this space came in 2019 when I read a paper by Demis Hassabis of DeepMind advocating for machine learning and AI researchers to go back to their roots in neuroscience. I took that literally — I went back to the neuroscience department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne, and asked what was exciting them.
I'm always searching for that black-swan, what is that project, or who is that artist that feels specials, and feels counter-culture. Who is that artist that feels interesting and has a bold, unapologetic point of view? That's what pulls me in- and you know what, if you find that and put the right strategy around it? You can disrupt culture.
I would love to say that we knew all the answers in advance, but the truth is that we discovered our product and opportunity, rather than planning for it. We started a company to build a massively multiplayer game, and in the process, it very quickly became apparent to us what the utility of Slack was as we used a prototype to collaborate internally.
If you only listen to the voices around you, you'll amalgamate them into something that already exists… My view was that consensus isn't going to build something that will change the game.
When you put a prize out there, you legitimise the pursuit of something which is often pretty audacious. Legitimacy also brings about renewed focus and vigour on the problem at hand- it's a little like the context of a 4 minute mile… nobody thought it was possible until it was achieved.