Technology Entrepreneurship: Lab to Market -------Introduction (Part 2)

Introduction (part 2)

What is entrepreneurship? Is it something that only your boss need to worry about? Is it a part of your daily life? In this chapter, I’m going to lead you to learn about what is the mysterious entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship versus Entrepreneuring

What those successful guys say about it?

---------- By Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering¹

So, what is it actually?

History of the word

As the saying goes, 'You want to learn about it, first learn about its history.'
The word entrepreneurship is it actually comes from the French word to undertake, which is kind of ironic because that means literally undertaker, which is, unfortunately, where we find ourselves often, as entrepreneurs, is you’re dealing with undertaking in the other meaning of the word.

But the real, the more serious part is the ending of the word.
“Ship” as the ending of a word in English often means that the state of being something-- craftsmanship, leadership, friendship, sportsmanship.
All these ships mean the state of being something.
To be specific, if I am an engineer, I don’t do “engineer-ship.” Instead, I do engineering, which is the act of doing something. And what I really find as an unfortunate remnant of the history of this field is that people are thought to be something versus do something, and therefore they spend all their time trying to analyze the history, the DNA, the character of people who do this. Whereas I think at some point, people are going to realize that a lot of different kinds of people can do this, but the “this” is entrepreneuring, it’s not entrepreneurship. And as soon as society flips that-- which is, by the way, happening right around us. All these incubators, mentor services.

Accelerators.
But when I started 20 years ago, that was not at all in vogue. It’s great to celebrate things, but after a while, you got to stop celebrating this because it shouldn’t be this rare, and it shouldn’t be this hard. The reason it is that people often tell themselves, this is like a lottery. It’s not going to work. And they do it without a lot of forethought.

Optional discussion

Here is a topic which you can join in, you can discuss in comments.

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1. The image and the inspiration are from a class of Mr. Noubar Afeyan ↩︎