The Information Entrepreneur

Citation

Brunnen, D.J. (2001), "The Information Entrepreneur", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 5, pp. 313-316. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.13.5.313.2

Here is the deal. Invest some resources – mostly your own time. The personal commitment is essential. In terms of opportunity cost and risk your own time is the most critical priority – but you do it because this new venture is expected to provide benefit.

And in what are we to invest? Reading this review. It may encourage further investment – purchasing and reading the book – and gain or satisfaction may or may not be appreciated. That is the essence of any new venture – personal risk.

Here is another proposition. Write this book. A much bigger investment. A greater personal risk and a much more difficult decision. Let us now take away part of this risk by sharing the cost of the investment – in this case through sponsorship by a large multinational IT company. Gain or satisfaction is still not guaranteed. Risk shared means mutual inter‐dependence.

Every venture manager I have ever known has to face this dilemma. We learn this as children when mothers declaim “Do I have to do everything myself?” We have an idea. We gather resources – usually other people. We venture forth. We discover that our ideas are not fully understood. We struggle to explain. We try to understand others’ limitations. Some of them, we protest, “just don’t get it”. Some of us only then learn that we are not very good at leading, mentoring, directing, communicating.

This world of opportunities, the venture space afforded by easy information networking, intensifies the temptations and accelerates the speed with which we can succeed or fail. We have moved at astonishing speed from being naturally paced agrarians. We have travelled beyond the simply industrious – making things and beyond even the quality era – making things that work. We find ourselves (all credit to technology) in the sunlit uplands of an interconnected world where we can make things that work with other things. This is what those technologists mean when they bandy about terms such as interoperability, open systems integration and Internetworking.

And in our commercial designs, the nature of our ventures has moved from clearly bounded businesses that sought salvation (and cost control) through self‐sufficiency to those designed from inception to create value by working with other businesses. And it is to this latter group, those seeking to transform themselves or their ventures into this outward‐looking, unbounded, unbundled, value‐focused commerciality, that Professor Colin Coulson‐Thomas’s book is addressed. Even those most‐dedicated stabilisers of organisational practice – public sector managers – are being urged to engage in joined‐up thinking and to consider the world of the Information Entrepreneur and the changing requirements for corporate and individual success.

To understand the value of this book it helps to place it in the wider context of the development of management writing. There is a well worn path. The drivers of scientific and technological endeavour (and solutions looking for problems) are eventually deposed by realisable commercial notions. Fascinating inventions become commercial enablers. Venture objectives are transformed from “doing things” to “enabling things to be done”. Similarly the self‐centred focus on that system or machine we call “the organisation” – “making the business work” – is deposed by a greater concern for empowering the networked individual and creating ventures that work with other ventures.

Colin’s writing has itself trodden this path along with others. Pile up his works chronologically alongside the piles of Handy and Drucker and the same trend is evident. Attempts to study, theorise and rationalise organisational behaviour give way to more individual concerns about external relationships. In Colin’s stack we will find The Future of the Organisation now topped by Individuals and Enterprise. Curiously The Information Entrepreneur seems more naturally to fit between these two – and the explanation becomes clear when one realises that in this writing venture the author found that the de‐risking process and its concomitant dependency on a sponsor resulted in its delayed appearance. And this delay explains its clear influence on Individuals and Enterprise which made it to the bookshops in a respectable time.

The delay, however, seems not to have diminished its value or currency. It was written in a different format – very much as a management guide – and it is in this production that Colin is seen more fully to develop and intensify the practical aspects of the management workbook style. Check‐lists abound. Recommendations are listed. Mini‐case studies are boxed. The structure – its “granularity” – makes it easily consumed in bite‐sized chunks. It is made to perform – to work – and to be a tool that individuals or small groups, particularly of younger people, can work with. The content is intended to challenge, to engender debate, to stimulate ideas, to enable learning.

Oddly, considering its genesis and apparently high‐tech sponsorship, it is available only in printed form and not as an on‐line production – infinitely divisible for remix and recombination with one’s own or corporate materials. And this is also perhaps explained by the dilution of risk – the limitations of venture partners to sustain interest over a time‐frame that can be trashed by commercial realities. It would be interesting to know the extent to which the sponsoring organisation has made use of the book amongst its own people and their sales channel partners.

For the rest of us, however, this is certainly a useful and compact tome. As ever, Colin’s examples and insights are often drawn from his role as Chairman of the Judging Panel for eBusiness Innovations – the world’s longest running awards programme for business transformation, now in its ninth year. (www.ecommerce‐awards.com) Awards programmes – if they are not reduced to excuses for product puffery – provide a great platform for picking up forward trends and changing attitudes. The book is also informed by Colin’s ongoing editorship of a series of studies and publications focused on specific management disciplines.

The end result of this venture, after the trauma of a difficult gestation, clearly justifies the investment. And for those of us venture managers who feel strung out and about to declaim “Do I have to do everything myself?” there is at least the opportunity to make chapters of the book required reading for those who are in danger of letting go of things they have not yet fully grasped.

Now was that a good deal?