Poetry and Enterprise Innovation
07.23.2005 by Brian Mulconrey

Wednesday, May 1, 2019 � What were the forces that drove the explosion in new enterprises during the first two decades of the 21st century? Accelerating technology curves were certainly a big part of the story. But a surprising number of new enterprises can trace their roots to brief essays and 3 minute video segments that came to be called - enterprise poetry.

An enterprise poem starts with an idea for an enterprise that doesn't yet exist. The first 150 words describe it from a date in the future, e.g., Sunday, December 22, 2024. This might be a new product, process, government structure, social movement, or any human enterprise. The middle section � 300 words � tells the story of how this enterprise came to life. What were the forces that caused it to happen? The last section � about 150 words � brings us back to the present.

In 350 BC Aristotle wrote, "The poet and the historian differ not by writing in verse or in prose� The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen." The global professionals and entrepreneurs described in the January 2016 Indian Institute of Management (IIM) study titled "The New Enterprise Revolution: 2006 to 2015" didn't consider themselves poets. But they all worked in the realm of imagining enterprises that may happen and then transforming these idea prototypes into enterprises that had happened. The IIM study performed an economic autopsy on a diverse collection of 20th century business models that died in the New Enterprise Revolution, stranding global investors atop an estimated $25 trillion mountain of obsolete capital and infrastructure.

A second and interrelated force driving the evolution of enterprise poetry was the need for speed. The life expectancy of any enterprise strategy has fallen on an almost exponential curve over the past decade. Enterprise poetry provided a vehicle for accelerating the process of inventing new strategies. With an accepted format, it became safe to speculate on what may happen. Operating in a hypothetical future transformed these prototypes from the realm of flaky speculation and unbelievable prediction to a legitimate voyage of exploration. Even the missing details in an enterprise poem provide jumping off points for further strategic conversation.

A third driving force propelling enterprise poetry was a trend that came to be known as the democratization of strategy. In the 20th century, strategy was the domain of chief executives and elite strategy professionals. In the first decade of the 21st century it became clear that the continuation of this process was a formula for disaster. Some of the best new enterprise ideas were coming from the organizational fringes both geographic and functional. Enterprise poetry empowered individuals and small groups to rapidly invent and deploy new strategies. A big picture enterprise poem would often spawn additional enterprise poems describing new processes or marketing methods needed to bring the overall enterprise to life.

The Internet and personal fabrication technology were a powerful combination for channeling the imaginations of individuals and small groups into prototyping new enterprises. This typically involved combinations of concept prototypes and fully functional product prototypes. In a prophetic 2005 book MIT's Neal Gershenfeld described how personal fabrication technology, "helps develop the planet's most precious natural resource of all, its people and their ideas."

The futurist Alvin Toffler coined the term "prosumer" to describe the merging of the roles of producer and consumer in 1980. Forty years later the prosumer is now an accepted reality as individuals and small groups configure their own personal networks of enterprises. Yet, even today, the pace of cultural evolution means that many enterprises require a decade or more to fully develop. Enterprise poetry helped to popularize longer term thinking by providing a literary format for visiting a future in which an enterprise has happened and then working our way back again to reverse engineer how that future happened.

� 2005 - All Rights Reserved.