Are You An Accidental Entrepreneur?

Are you constantly looking for ideas to improve your everyday life products? And/or have you ever sought yourself repairing or reinventing one of your beloved products due to your persistent dissatisfaction while using it? Or even more, have all your friends suddenly started paying you money to make them this same “great and unique product” only you know how to produce? Then, you might be an accidental entrepreneur!

“Every time I used my Clean Shopper in the grocery store, I was approached by mothers wanting to know where they could buy one. I knew there was a demand for the product, so I started a company.” (cleanshopper.com, 2007)

Ideas For Free

For more than 30 years user innovation literature has studied an especial type of individuals who once experience a need in their own lives, develop an innovation to address this specific need. This singular users, who can be not only persons, but also firms, are known as lead users. Von Hippel coined this term in 1986, referring to these kind of users as lead users due to the fact that they are usually ahead on important market trends, since they face needs that will become general much earlier than in the marketplace.

However, not all lead users are entrepreneurs. These individuals are able to innovate frequently and create economically significant innovations, however, they do not normally try to commercialize their innovations. Why is this? Many user innovators unlike normal entrepreneurs don’t care about profiting from their ideas; they are “accidental entrepreneurs”. They are 100% motivated by the benefit of finding a solution that meets their needs, sometimes even openly sharing this solution with others, or giving them away for free! The greater the benefit for these individuals, the greater will be these individuals’ effort to find a solution to their need!

In addition, user entrepreneurs are this kind of persons who without even thinking about evaluating the commercial opportunity, or even being aware of the potential of their idea, jump in to develop a functional model of it for their own use. It might be that they do it at work after experiencing a need for improving a product or service they use in their professions, or it could also be a product or service they just use in their day-to-day lives. On the contrary, typical entrepreneurs would identify the potential opportunity of their ideas before materializing any of them.

“I didn’t really expect that I was going to have a company — I just thought, ‘I’m going to make a video’.” – founder of Baby Einstein (ladieswholaunch.com, 2007)

Where Can I Find Those Ideas?

Even though many people might think that profit is the only possible motivation for coming up with an innovative business idea, this isn’t true. User entrepreneurship and accidental entrepreneurs are not only common, but also occur across many industries.

Here we have some examples of users that have succeeded with their innovations:

1. Ed Roberts, engineer, developer of ALTAIR 8800, the first Personal Computer. See The Altair 8800 of Ed Roberts.
2. Tony Alva, one of the most influential skateboarders in the world who founded ALVA Skateboard. In 1972, he joined the legendary Z-Boys who were among the first to bring skating empty pools into the mainstream. Watch Lords of Dogtown (2005).
3. Bruno and Dominique Legaignoux, sailors who became interested in kites when they tried to develop an efficient sailing boat under the brand “Wipika”, they invented kitesurfing and created a new industry. See History of Kite Surfing.
4. Gary Fisher, passionate about biking off-road, he needed a bike that suited his high requirements, thus he created the mountain bike. He also founded his own firm fisherbike.com. See The History Of Gary Fisher.

So whether you are an accidental entrepreneur or not, the key message of this article is that entrepreneurship might be the result of different kinds of motivations, and therefore the creative process in both cases might differ. But does the final result differ? Is it better the solution of those who are only interested in getting benefit from meeting a personal need or the one of those who are only concerned in profiting from it? What do you think?

In any case, if you think you might be one of these particular users, you already have created an unique product or service to meet your own need as well as identified an opportunity in the market for it, what are you waiting for?

In 1980, Phil Baechler realized after going for a run with his son that the standard wheels on his baby stroller would never last. He replaced these with bicycle wheels from his garage – and the three-wheeled “Baby Jogger” was born.

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Photo credit: Stefan Baudy via Visualhunt.com / CC BY