Daily Drucker Series:Innovation and Risk Taking

I once attended a university symposium on entrepreneurship at which a number of psychologists spoke. Although their papers disagreed on everything else, they all talked about an “entrepreneurial personality” which was characterized by a “propensity for risk taking”. A well known and successful innovator and entrepreneur who had built a process-based innovation into a substantial worldwide business in the space of twenty-five years was then asked to comment. He said: “I find myself baffled by your papers. I think I know as many successful innovators and entrepreneurs as anyone, beginning with myself. I have never come accross an ‘entrepreneurial personality’. The successful ones I know all have, however, one thing – and only one thing – in common: they are not ‘risk takers’. They try to define the risks they have to take and to minimize them as much as possible. Otherwise none of us could have succeeded”.