The Pinnacle of Entrepreneurship

There are three primal categories of successful entrepreneurship. They are providing, innovating, and inventing. The foremost, but least common, is inventing.

To be a successful inventor, which is the premier summit of all entrepreneurship, requires these three irrefutable qualities. They are:

1. Creativity. Creative genius is the God-given ability to generate something that does not previously exist, or dramatically change an existing thing so it is considered a new thing.  We can take raw material, physical or mental, and produce something. This is creative power and it is in everyone, in varying degrees.
2. Persistence. This is a quality that is learned. We are not born with a love of plowing through adversity. We develop it. There are problems inherent in all business ideas that have not yet been tested. Sometimes a hundred prototypes antedate the final version. Sometimes ten thousand. The final product happens by persistence.

Without persistence, there is no inventing. There is only dreaming.

“For in many dreams and in many words there is emptiness…” Ecclesiastes 5:7

3. Implementation. Ideas, and specifically business ideas, are merely a personal amusement for the owner unless there is implementation. Putting the idea to work in a product or service and marketing it to the world is half the battle; perhaps more than half.

While one person may be a great inventor of ideas, she may have little to no skill in the development of the product. This is where the team effort is so important. Bringing other people into the venture who can do things you can’t do is a crucial aspect of the inventor’s business.

The development of any product can include copyrights, trademarks, and patents. There is manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and branding. All of these are integral to the production of an invention to make it useful to others. These are the legs of implementation, the third and necessary part of invention.

To be a successful provider in business can be difficult. To improve upon the current product or service is even more challenging. But to invent, to create what does not yet exist, can drive the entrepreneur to the brink of exhaustion and despair. Through perseverance and determination, however, it can be done, and done well. And the results of inventing, the pinnacle of entrepreneurship, can change the world.