Artists and Scientists

Recently, I finished reading the acclaimed tome by Eric Reis, The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. The ending was the most impressive part to me. Reis is willing to submit his own ideas of innovation accounting and the like to rigorous testing in startup research labs in universities. A footnote mentions that Nathan Furr of BYU and Thomas Eisenmann of Harvard Business School are already studying lean startup management practices. In a startup world full of dogma, this is thoroughly refreshing. This has also helped me see that there is a continuum of startup ideation and management practices. On one end, there is the thoroughly scientific crowd, focused on meaningful metrics and rigid adherence to the rule of data, however interpreted. On the other, there are those who rely on epiphanies, intuition, and instinct. I certainly don't claim that these are mutually exclusive nor that one is necessarily superior to the other. Context matters.

The Steam Engine of the 2010s?

I read a couple of technology-/startup-oriented articles recently. One was yesterday's Forbes article on developeronomics which describes the growing prominence of talented software developers and investment in them in stark terms.