Entrepreneurs vs Small Business Owners

I tweeted a while back making the point that there is a fundamental difference between entrepreneurs and small business owners and consequently they require different types of support from both the private and public sector.  Unsurprisingly, someone asked what the difference was and this is my belated albeit short response.

As I see it, an entrepreneur is someone who takes an innovation to market while small business owner is someone who, well, runs a small business. 

This of course raises the question of what innovation is and for insight into this I would recommend taking at look at the series of blog posts written by Shawn Cunningham earlier this year:

• Quick recap: what is an innovation system?
• The difference between invention and innovation
• Innovation is not linear

Games Planners Play

Uli Harmes-Liedke from mesopartner brought the Urbanology game to my attention via one of his tweets. The game usually takes the form of an installation at the BMW Guggenheim Lab wherever it happens to be and allows people to become city planners for a day, lobbying for and making decisions on urban issues and seeing the results. You can also play a version of it on-line.

The game itself is fairly simple: you answer ten questions relating to urban issues and then your future city is created on the basis of your answers. The game also give you a real-world city that comes closest to your future city. Mine came out as Johannesburg – in my view a less than desirable urban future although some people seem to like it.

The rest of the BMW Guggenheim Lab site is well worth a visit with lots of other interesting material. Unfortunately the physical installation doesn't appear to be coming to South Africa anytime soon. Happy playing.

Mine's a Pint

I recently read an article on the Guardian newspaper website that covered two particular interests of mine: beer and in a round about way red tape. Pubs in the United Kingdom are required by law to serve beer either in pint or half-pint measures. This means that you can order a pint anywhere in the country and you will get a glass containing exactly the same number of milliliters of beer (473.176473 of them to be precise).

The British government has just announced a plan to allow pubs to serve beer in glasses that hold two-thirds of a pint. Apart from eroding a grand old British tradition (The first legislation requiring beer to be served in pints dates back to 1698), this measure aims to "nudge" Britons away from their binge drinking habits. The argument is that smaller measures will mean that people will drink less. However, the editor of the Guardian has suggested that at the heart of the problem of binge drinking is the fact that "Brits have an unfortunate tendency to pour strong foreign lagers – Stella, even Leffe – into a pint jar for which they were not intended, and to get poisonously pie-eyed in the process."

So how does this link to red tape? In a regulatory sense, rules that are put in place to deal with particular problems that don't address the root cause of the problem are often identified as problems in red tape reduction processes. In the case of the pint, it is not the size of the glass that seems to be the problem but rather the alcohol content of what goes in it. This type of regulation usually leads to all sorts of outcomes but rarely does it result in any meaningful change.