Idea Entrepreneurship is Going Viral

It’s intriguing that we’ve had an incredible response to this idea of the idea entrepreneur from people of every description.  It’s students, 13-year-old kids, MBA students, young people just starting out their careers, people who have retired, people from around the world, and people in all kinds of professions and disciplines. 

So we’ve heard from Librarians, from people in insurance, from people in social entrepreneurship, and they all say, “This is what I would like to be, this is how I would like to structure my life.  What can be better than to be following my own personal fascination, expressing myself in a way that gets the idea out, creating respiration in a way that brings the idea to lots of people, and affecting some kind of change or improvement in the world?”

And it seems to be catching on with people of all kinds. And I think part of it is that the need for individual action is so great that art institutions are not making change in ways that we would like to.  So individuals are saying, “We need to do this and we believe we can do this.”  And they are aided by what I call the idea-plex, which is all those idea generating channels and systems and venues. 

So, the social media, all the conferences, there’s so many ways to get ideas out there now, so many more than there used to be that the effort of being an idea entrepreneur is made easier, but also made difficult because there are so many ideas out there that are competing with you.

But I think it’s a very current idea and I’m fascinated by the response that we’ve had to it.  

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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