Joel Orr's World

The Myth About Creation Myths - Story - Background - Origin:
Tales of groundbreaking innovation sound a lot alike. Like action-adventure movies, they have a predictable structure. You know how Die Hard 4 is going to end and you know how YouTube began: Some ordinary guys, without money or power, triumph via a brilliant insight and scrappy groundwork, just like Hewlett and Packard, who started in their garage. Or Jobs and Woz, who founded Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) in another garage. Or Michael Dell, who lived the same tale but upgraded to a dorm room. All rebels who triumphed over Big Business.

But what if those stories mislead us about what it takes to generate great ideas? Two researchers from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, Pino Audia and Chris Rider, have debunked the Myth of the Garage in a recent paper. The garage, they say, "evokes the image of the lone individual who relies primarily on his or her extraordinary efforts and talent" to triumph. The reality is that successful founders are usually "organizational products." A separate study of VC-backed companies found that 91% were related to the founders' prior job experience. Audia and Rider say entrepreneurial triumphs aren't due to lonely, iconoclastic work--they're "eminently social." Wait a minute: Entrepreneurs aren't rebels, then, so much as recently departed organization men.