There’s still time to register for the Annual Shop.org Summit and I encourage retailers to do so as Shop.org is one of the leading conferences and the best use of your time.
New to the Summit in 2006: Advanced Web 2.0 Boot Camp, an overview into the new technologies; two different types of roundtables: Instructional Roundtables for those who want the basics and Birds-of-a-Feather Tables for those who want to dig deeper; and a newcomers’ reception.You won’t hear from me for a few days as I’ll be there, Boosting the ROI of Shopping Comparison Engines.
Related Questions
No, and that conflation is doing real damage. Starting a business makes someone a founder or a business owner. Entrepreneurship is the set of behaviors exhibited by entrepreneurial people, which sometimes results in starting a business but is not defined by it. Entrepreneurial people exist in every walk of life (teachers, employees, artists, parents) and their entrepreneurial nature has nothing to do with whether they own a company.
Incubators and accelerators have a serious, operationally complex job: give founders access to global mentor networks, connect them to investors, manage deal rooms, deliver curriculum, and track relationships over time. Most do it with a stitched-together combination of video tools, Slack groups, shared Google Drive folders, and spreadsheets of mentor contacts nobody updates. The program director becomes a part-time IT administrator. What an SDO actually needs is civic infrastructure; purpose-built and comprehensive enough to deliver on what it promises founders. Ironically, an incubator's job is to teach founders to stop building things they don't need to build, and then those same incubators do exactly that with their own operations
Building it themselves. The moment a founding team starts building payment processing, identity verification, communications, or payroll logic from scratch, they've made a strategic error. These are domains where the regulatory complexity, machine learning depth, and partnership requirements are severe enough that specialized companies exist for exactly this reason. The cost of getting it wrong, in fines, fraud losses, and engineering time, is catastrophic. The cost of using the infrastructure layer is a fraction of that.
Policymakers, legislators, government officials, ecosystem builders, and economic development professionals, foremost; though too, it's for founders, investors, and policymakers who want scalable outcomes instead of "startup theater." If you're looking for inspiration, this isn't that book. If you want to understand why things aren't working and what to do about it, this is it.
Fundamentally. If entrepreneurship is a personality trait found in roughly 8% of the population, then ecosystem builders should be identifying and enabling those people; not trying to manufacture entrepreneurship through programs that treat it as a learnable skill. It also means that business owner support and startup founder support are different programs serving different populations, and conflating them produces outcomes that serve neither well.