Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was considered “The one who sees things differently”. Do you think it is enough seeing things differently to be a successful entrepreneur? What is it also necessary to have success? Read Appendix B and, by comparing Meucci, Hillis and Edison, answer to these questions also by using the framework in Section 3.6. of SSP.

Being different is not enough to be a successful entrepreneur. A successful entrepreneur is someone able to find a competitive advantage that enables its company to be stronger than its competitors. It can come from an internal resource but to be a really competitive advantage it must be, valuable, it adds value to the product, rare, not all companies can have it, not-imitable and organizationally supported, that is well ingrained in the organization. Meucci, for example, was one who sees things differently but he was not a successful entrepreneur because he was not able to protect his idea from imitation. When he could afford expenses for having a patent, he did not sell his telephone invention. Therefore someone else could use his invention. Danny Hills co-founded Thinking Machines Corporation. He was not able to give the right value to his products, so consumers were not willingness to pay the high prices of Thinking Machines’ power computer. Danny Hills with his company were not able to decrease the price of these computer and at the same time they were not able to make consumers aware about the high value of their computer. In my opinion, Edison was a successful entrepreneur. He understood the importance of differentiating the product, in fact he invented many important things. And at the same time he understood the importance of maintaining affordable prices to permit more people to reach these products. I think these two point were the key of his success.