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There's great research here showing that we all catch things out of the corner of
our eye when we are leaving home and getting on the metro, or
biking to work, or driving to work, or walking to work,
you might catch something, you might see something that looks unusual.
The vast majority of people dismiss that.
Because you're in a routine.
You're going from work to your office, and you're doing your ordinary life.
Entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurial alert people will jump on that,
they will ask a few more questions.
They will go for a glitch, it's a little bit of a glitch that you see or
that you catch.
Something is unusual.
If you want to find the gap you need to probe there.
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It starts with being alert,.
And in the financial marketplace we would call this arbitrage.
There are financial arbitrage moments in a marketplace.
There's a glitch, and if you trade really quickly in the financial
market you can make a lot of money in the arbitrage moment.
This exists in the entrepreneurial environment as well.
So in an entrepreneurial marketplace, if you can see one of these glitches,
if you can spot one of these things or detect an anomaly, and go for
it, you can potentially harness a big entrepreneurial outcome.
So if you want to spot a gap, one thing to do is see what's working
somewhere else and then ask the questions, why is it working there?
What's working about that,
what are the fundamental underlying principles that make that work?
And then fly it over and reapply it somewhere else.
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And example that we all know is Starbucks.
So Howard Schultz did not create coffee culture.
He saw it in Italy.
He went to this conference in Italy and he loved the fact that
the Italians had left home and before they got to their conference or office,
they stopped at a coffee house and this was the third place they went.
This is the Starbucks third location argument.
If home is your first place then office is your second place the third place is
a coffee house.
So he doesn't invent that,
he sees it, he loves it, he picks it up, and he brings it into Seattle.
And what very few people know about this is that he did an exact copy, paste.
So that does not work.
In that first Starbucks example in Seattle, they had bow tie clad waiters,
and little white porcelain cups and opera music, and a stand up coffee bar.
It looked very Italian, and that did not exactly work in Seattle.
And so he did a twist on this model and it became Starbucks that we know now.
It's more casual setting, you can sit and have your computer, you can
talk with others, it can be a work space for many people it's the third location.
But this is the idea that you see something and
you transport it with a twist.
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There are examples that you can move across geographies
you can move them across sectors.
And you bring old ideas up to date.
You move across time.
So Google is an example here, where the founders used [INAUDIBLE]
that was the Standford Library ranking system of the old school catalogues,
card catalogues.
You can apply that old idea to the world wide web, you get Google.
And at the time, Altavista existed, there were all kinds of search.
But you can take an old idea and bring it into a new world of work and
create something really powerful.
So this is one way to spot a gap.
Look for something that works, and fly it across somewhere else and
do a little twist on it.
These is also called reason by analogy.
So there is a lot of powerful research showing that if compare and
contrast, if you draw analogies, that you'll access more of your
own brain power.
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So if you are spotting opportunities as an architect.
What you're looking for is an open space, and
you're looking to build from the ground up.
Just as an architect would build a brand new building in an open area,
you want to find a space that hasn't yet been addressed.
That often is a problem.
So, it's a friction point.
It's a bottleneck.
It's a problem for you.
Or it's a problem for other people.
Elon Musk is a great example.
So he is in the world saying, and
very much building solutions to solve problems for humanity.
That's exactly what Elon would say.
And so Tesla is solving the problem of sustainable transport.
And so where city is sustainable energy.
SpaceX is solving the problem of making life multi-planetary.
These are huge problems.
And as I have spent time with him in my research,
he literally believes that SpaceX is the vehicle,
it's the next step, to help humans take life to other planets.
So Mars would be the planet he believes we should inhabit next.
He is an architect because
what's he's doing is building something piece by piece from the ground up.
So if you take SpaceX as an example, he went out to NASA.
He called, he was on the NASA website, he was tracking down scientists saying,
hey when is the US Space Program going to Mars.
Who's doing that, how come we're not doing that?
That problem was not solved, there is an open space.
Then he started calling and traveling to Russia, and
saying okay, are you guys doing it?
If the United States isn't doing it, are the Russians doing it?
Then he was talking to some people in China.
No government was building rockets that would be going to mass.
And so he stood up SpaceX.
And he said,
all right we'll do up private company and we will build a reusable rocket.
This is a different way from reasoning by analogy that's the sunbird and
the architecture idea you reason by first principles.
Which means you break things down to the fundamental elements, the basic axioms.
Many mathematicians and physicists reason this way.
Elon is originally trained as a physicist.
You figure out the fundamental truths and the elements and
then you build piece by piece from the ground up.
So with SpaceX, that what is done.
The SpaceX team has taken over the contracts to resupply
the International Space Station.
SpaceX is doing that at one tenth the price that NASA did.
So this is solving a problem that wasn't solved and
building something with the elements in a different way from the ground up.
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An integrator is a person that looks at putting things together that haven't
been put together before in the past.
And you're mashing and smashing concepts together, sometimes it works,
sometimes it doesn't, and then sometimes it creates extraordinary opportunity.
So, if you think about the idea that, in the past a luxury car
was one thing and an all terrain vehicle was something completely different.
You put those together and you get luxury SUV.
This is a huge category that all the different
manufacturers of automobiles are making now.
That's an example, being an integrator, putting those two things together and
creating a new category.
Chipotle is a prime example, so Steve Ells is a classically trained chef.
He's an art history major originally.
He's not even a business person.
And what he realizes is while he has complete disdain for
fast food and he really does.
He is trained at the New York Culinary Academy.
If you are a culinary artist as a chef, you cannot stand the idea
that any hamburger place has got a frozen patty reheating on a grill, and
packaged up in a little plastic package and
handing off to people, the traditional fast food model.
So what Steve Elle does is creates fast casual dining.
And Chipotle is revolutionary in this model.
We see many examples like it now but it's cooking for the line.
So as people line up for Chipotle there are people slicing and dicing and
cooking the food right in front of you.
As the line gets longer more cooking goes on as the line gets shorter less
cooking goes on.
And that is the intersection of fast food and casual dining.
So all of us can go into the world and look for things to combine.
Many of the Internet models are this as well, many of the online retail sites,
discounted luxury goods in an auction format, for example.
There's different things all brought together
creating some very large Internet retailing models now.
So that's the idea of being an integrator.
It's just mashing and smashing things together and
creating novelty at those intersections.
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Curiosity is what really unlocks the ability to spot opportunity.
And it's important and available to every single one of us to continue
to ask questions and to continue to believe that we can discover and
probe and learn more and more every single day.
The Achilles heel here for
many business people is that you believe you're an expert.
So anyone who's already believing
that they have a certain expertise in any variety of business or any part of life,
actually stops asking questions and that's a dangerous thing.
So if you want to spot opportunity and you want to create something new in the world,
if you want to keep up in a rapidly changing world curiosity is your friend.
Curiosity is a tool to be alert and
to be able to see things that other people don't see.
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