Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas

Jeremy Gutsche Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas Crowne Business, 2015, $ 18.63 (Hard cover), 249 pagesNASCENT AND ESTABLISHED ENTREPRENEURS' success hinges upon their ability to identify and analyze potential opportunities. Opportunity recognition is typically described as a creative process in which opportunity seekers envision what can exist through innovation. In addition, for innovation to represent true opportunities, such innovation must meet needs or solve well defined problems found in the market. Unfortunately many times aspiring entrepreneurs pursue opportunities resulting in failure. While these failures provide entrepreneurs valuable learning experiences, many times they come at great costs, not only financially but also emotionally. This begs the question, how can aspiring entrepreneurs identify ideas that truly represent fruitful opportunities? James Gutsche offers insights to uncovering valuable opportunities in his latest book, Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas.James Gutsche is the founder and CEO of Trend Hunter, an online community devoted to identifying trends. Trend Hunter has over 155,000 members and is described by Gutsche as "a place for insatiably curious people to share ideas and get inspired." Not only does Trend Hunter provide a venue for sharing ideas, but also the company also analyzes the potential of ideas. In fact, Gutsche explains in his book that Trend Hunter has analyzed over 250,000 ideas by testing ideas on thousands of potential customers. In his book, James Gutsche offers advice on how individuals can overcome their self-imposed limitations and become more cognizant of trends in the environment which can lead to "unstoppable ideas."In Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas, Gutsche explains that successful idea generation requires a shift from a farmer to a hunter mentality, suggesting that individuals break from routinely repeating behaviors that have worked over time and focus on "hunting" the possible. He further contrasts a farmer mentality, characterized by three traps: complacency, repetition, and protectiveness, with a hunter mentality driven by insatiability, curiosity, and willingness to destroy. Specifically, he suggests that "complacency blocks curiosity, repetition prevents experimentation, and protectiveness impairs our ability to see potential" (Gutsche, p. 44). After describing the self-imposed limitations to creative idea generation and the "hunter" mentality that should be adopted to overcome such limitations, Gutsche then identifies six patterns of opportunity.The first pattern Gutsche identifies is convergence, which involves "creating a winning business by combining multiple products, services or trends" (p. 61). He emphasizes that convergence can represent the clearest path to developing successful new ventures with the potential of creating new industries, however poorly conceived convergence is the quickest path to failure.The second pattern of opportunity identified in Better and Faster: The Proven Path to Unstoppable Ideas is divergence. Divergence involves the development of "products and services designed to oppose or break free from the mainstream" (p. 85). Gutsche explains through divergence innovators can successfully pursue opportunities in established industries by developing value propositions counterintuitive to those currently offered in that industry. In other words, newcomers do not want to compete head to head with "giants in the industry" but are better served by changing the game.Gutsche identifies cyclicality as another pattern of opportunity where analyzing the past to forecast future trends is key. …