Over the last year or so I have have attended a number of meetups, conferences, camps, seminars and a tweetup or two in the UK, Ireland and the US. All of them have been concerned, one way or another, with developments in the Internet world and how to take advantage of them.
As one would hope and expect, all this discussion led to people taking action and embarking on projects of their own. However, nearly all the projects (there have been honourable exceptions) have pretty much looked and sounded like things that existed before. Lack of originality would be the most apt characterisation of all this ‘creative’ activity.
I am not alone in this observation. In an excellent and well-sourced article titled “The Big Idea: How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution” in the Harvard Business Review, the very first injunction from the author Daniel J. Isenberg is to "Stop Emulating Silicon Valley".
He gives a number of very good reasons not to do so including pointing out that the tendency is for the Valley to nurture only experienced entrepreneurs who already have some kind of track record. That is some serious cutting of wheat from the chaff.
