Reading Reflection No. 3

Innovation and Entrepreneurship by Peter Drucker explains and analyzes the topics of innovation and entrepreneurship as a systematic discipline that can be learned, rather than something that happens by chance or magic. After reading the book, it seems like entrepreneurship can be integrated into the subject of management science. Drucker’s thesis was, “Systematic innovation 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.” What I found interesting was that this book was originally published in 1985, but quite a few of its principles are still applicable to the economy of today. As for other aspects of the book’s theme, it is divided into three parts. Part one defines innovation as a way in which entrepreneurs exploit change in order to create a new product or service. By their nature, entrepreneurial enterprises create some type of market niche and satisfy customer need. This part requires opportunity analysis, starting things small, looking to the simple aspects, and achieving leadership. Part 2 discusses managerial strategies for an organization. It basically stated that all organizations must acquire some level of entrepreneurial competence in order to be relevant along with the changes in the economy and society. Part 3 discusses practices that entrepreneurs should follow. For example, some of these include aiming for leadership of a new market or existing market, finding a specialized niche, and changing the economic characteristics of a market, product, or industry.

After reading the book, I noticed that there were a lot of similarities between part one of the book and what I learned in ENT 3003. For example, the parts on opportunity analysis in the book reminded me of some of the assignments that had to do with finding opportunity. Also, the definition of innovation from the book connected with how the entrepreneur is defined in this course.

If I had to design an exercise for this course based on this book, it would be a simple assignment that asks students to discuss how their venture can be organized towards one of the four entrepreneurial strategies. Those four strategies are ‘getting there first’, ‘hitting them where they aren’t’, ‘finding a specialized niche’, and ‘changing the economic characteristics of a product, market, or industry’.

The surprise from this book was the idea that innovation does not have to be a technical “thing” altogether. Innovation is an economic or social rather than a technical term. It can be defined as changing the yield of resources.