Rambling: Entrepreneurship or incubation

When Kai-Fu Lee founded the Innovation Workshop last year, many people would naturally compare it to Bill Gross's Idealab and Paul Graham's Y Combinator. In fact, however, innovation workshops are completely different from the latter, which is determined by the identity and experience of the founders.

Bill Gross is a business dreamer, and he has founded many companies. He founded the Idealab in 1996, in order to put his own diverse business fantasies into practice. Of the many companies Idealab successfully hatched, goto.com (later Overture) was probably the most famous, and he pioneered a paid search model. In a sense, Idealab is Bill Gross's personal incubator.

Paul Graham is a technical hacker and business mentor. He was one of the first web entrepreneurs and a major contributor to Lisp, and he believed in technology, trusting individuals. His unique technical business thinking has influenced many entrepreneurs. In Graham's personal history, you can hardly see his experience of working for a big company. Y Combinator is an angel investment firm focused on investing in early-stage projects and small-tech teams, which in fact represents Graham's understanding of technology and business.

Kai-Fu Lee is one of the most successful professional managers, respectively, in Apple, Microsoft and Google, three of the most cattle IT companies in the high pipe, he is more familiar with the development and management of large companies, and he is also very keen to play the role of young tutors. Kai-Fu Lee's experience, brought to the innovation workshop the following advantages: 1. Ability to grasp major technical trends 2. Ability of research and development management and engineer Management 3. Good industry network resources; 4. Influence among young technicians.

From the above introduction, we can see that the different personal experience, so that seems similar to the pattern, has a completely different essence. For innovation factories, this is not the place to hatch the next Ma and the next Jack. The entrepreneur like Ma and Jack Yun, as Wang Jianyue said, is indeed a wild animal. But not all innovations that have commercial value are wild, and not all talented engineers are able to handle all the business obstacles. Gmail is not wild, but who can deny its commercial value and technological innovation?

The innovation plant may never have been created to hatch a great company, but it does have more opportunities to hatch very creative, dynamic small companies on Android and the iphone, or to have expertise from the outset to acquire the potential of large companies. The founder of the Microsoft China Research Institute and Google China Research Institute of Lee Kai-fu, just more suitable for such an incubator.

China's Internet entrepreneurial environment, there is a widespread emphasis on marketing technology, the shortcomings of the method, the majority of the so-called entrepreneurial, failed to know where the defeat. Innovation workshops may partly correct such biases.

Source: http://blog.donews.com/keso/archive/2010/05/22/1583549.aspx