The Journey to Impact: People Over Ideas
Rana K. Gupta formerly served as director of faculty entrepreneurship at Boston University. He helped BU researchers bring technology and other research breakthroughs to the marketplace to increase their impact through programs and workshops, one-on-one consulting with faculty, educational resources, and community building among BU innovators.
Good Researchers and Practitioners,
Here’s what I learned and realized this last year while listening to all of you. It’s going to sound obvious as soon as I say it. Your reaction may be to ask, aren’t we doing that?
Here it is. If we are going to create impact, if BU is going to have a positive social impact on society, our focus must be on people, not ideas. People over ideas is the catch phrase.
Ideas come and go; you’ll have several ideas over the coming years, to be sure. Some of them will be good and the VAST majority will be awful. Your challenge is to decipher those ideas that address a need, regardless of how inventive, new, or different they are. After determining if you’ve found a need to address and a solution to address that need, you still must bring the solution to people.
In an entrepreneurship class a student once said: professor, I’m not an idea guy. I don’t think I can be an entrepreneur. In response, I said to the class and him—Ideas are a dime a dozen. Witness all the idle patents in this world (the majority of them). If you’re a person who can execute, THAT is far more valuable than the person who came up with some idea. Ideas don’t jump up and run out the building to create an impact, people do.
The programs we are launching are designed to give you the tools, resources, connections, and skills to make sure your idea becomes an innovation (something that’s adopted). And for that (adoption) to happen, first you must make sure you’re addressing another person’s need. A clever idea and an attractive market do not a solution make. People (you) addressing other people’s needs makes for adopted solutions and the desired impact.
We have an over-tendency to talk about ideas—cool ideas, and then prematurely label them innovative or disruptive. But when you think about change and impact, think about the people behind the ideas.
People over ideas.
Rana