The Venture Edge

Tuesday I had the pleasure of meeting the producer of the documentary film The Triumph of the Dream, Norman Seeff, a medical doctor turned photographer.  In a a visually intimate and compelling style, Seeff explores the human and emotional side of the Mars Exploration mission during which engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) successfully landed two Mars Rovers on the surface of the planet. It turns out that the technical achievements of the mission served merely as the context or backdrop for the very real inner journey experienced by the team members as they struggled to overcome the inertia of previous failures with the Mars Polar Lander mission in 2000.

I was recently discussing with a friend the difference between creativity and innovation, and how people tend to confuse and conflate the two. In business, while creativity -- coming up with new ideas and new ways of looking at the world -- is a nice thing to have in any organization, unless you are creating ideas that can be put to use (innovations), then it is of little real use. Innovations flow directly to the bottom line, while creativity tends to float somewhere high above.

The more information you have, the easier it is to solve a problem.  Unfortunately, entrepreneurs typically don't have all the information they need to define the problem they're actually trying to solve.  Defining the problem correctly is absolutely essential to coming up with a business opportunity that can succeed in the market.