This audio recording by Steve Blank should be required reading for economic developers. This week I have had the opportunity to speak about the development of technological entrepreneurship with the state government, an academic institution and a large corporate player. All had a vision and all were investing in what in production assets, such as training software developers, building facilities and purchasing equipment. That’s great yet presupposes that “the capability precedes the market”.
Facebook’s incredible success demonstrates and accelerates the opposite: compelling yet relatively simple (Facebook is not fundamentally rocket science other than its scalability) technology square aimed at the globalized market wins the day today. Given the accelerants of the Apple App Store, Facebook’s 900M users and the collapsing cost of starting up, laboratories should be experimenting on markets, not on mice.
