Kelly talks to Lori Rosenkopf, Vice-Dean of Entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business. Her new book is called, “Unstoppable Entrepreneurs: 7 Paths for Unleashing Successful Startups and Creating Value through Innovation.”

My wife teaches in the entrepreneurial school at Northwestern in a class that uses improv and comedy for your entrepreneurs to be more resilient. 

“The book is called ‘Unstoppable Entrepreneurs’ for a reason. I have six Rs of an entrepreneurial mindset. One of them is resilience, but unstoppable entrepreneurs sounds a lot sexier as a book title than resilient entrepreneurs. But so much of the act of entrepreneurship, whatever path you might follow, is about dealing with negative feedback and responding to that as your wife would teach. So, whether that is a customer who decides they don’t want your product because you haven’t given them the kind of price to performance ratio that they want, or it’s something completely out of your control like Covid happens or tariffs happen and the like. The most successful entrepreneurs are the ones who have the mindset that allows them to say there are a lot of different ways to solve a problem and I’ve got to switch now, understand the problem as it stands, and pivot in a way that’s going to allow me to get to the reason why I’m in this business in the first place.” 

One of the tricky things in this area is that for something to be novel, it’s going to be unusual – which is sometimes hard for people to get or understand. 

“You know, it’s so interesting to think about novelty because novelty suggests inspiration, which is a seed innovation, which turns into entrepreneurship. But yet things can also be too novel. There’s great research on scientific papers and looking at the citation patterns of these papers. And it turns out that if you put about 90 percent of your citations in a current field, then bring 10% in from somewhere else, those are the papers that get the most attention. If you’re all over the place, nobody can make sense of it. So, there’s that right degree of novelty.” 

You challenge the idea that all entrepreneurs are scruffy dropouts who developed their groundbreaking idea in their parent’s garage. 

“Yeah, this is a big part of why I wrote the book, Kelly, because the media stereotype is so pervasive. Like you said: drop out of college, get venture funding, build the unicorn, amass great personal wealth, and then hopefully be philanthropic with it. We could debate that part of the story all day long. But this is not what the students who I’m working with and the alumni that I see coming out of our programs, they are in a wide variety of industries, not just tech. They are following all different sorts of pathways, not just this big visible disruption. They are of a variety of ages, the average age of successful, even venture-backed entrepreneurs, is mid-30s, late 30s, early 40s, after they’ve amassed some experience. And, you know, they’re just demographically diverse. So, I really wanted to put out there a whole new set of role models, because the ones that we’re seeing all the time, while they have done things of great magnitude, they aren’t the ones who are inspiring many, many people.”