The Innovation Blind Spot, Ross Baird
The Innovation Blind Spot, Ross Baird
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The Innovation Blind Spot
Why We Back the Wrong Ideas--and What to Do About It

Author: Ross Baird, Steve Case

Narrator: Patrick Lawlor

Unabridged: 6 hr 36 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/12/2017


Synopsis

The world's innovation economy is broken. If you have an idea, depending on who you are or where you live, you might never get a shot. A handful of people in a handful of cities are deciding, behind closed doors, which entrepreneurs get a shot to succeed. The determining factor? Potential profit. We're living in a world where we are struggling to feed, provide energy, and provide quality jobs for a growing population, yet the innovation economy continues to prioritize investing billions in photo-sharing apps and on-demand food delivery services.

The result is a system that doesn't support most entrepreneurs—entrepreneurial activity is at a 30-year low—and a system that doesn't work for investors.

In The Innovation Blind Spot, venture capitalist Ross Baird demonstrates how to fix the problem by helping us find better ideas, looking at people, places, and industries often overlooked. Baird also explores "one-pocket thinking," which ensures ideas are not just benefiting a few people from the top down, but broadly benefiting entrepreneurs, business, and society from the bottom up. Ross's firm, Village Capital, is at the vanguard of a new way to finding ideas that is much more democratic and inclusive, and his method promises to dramatically increase success for everyone involved.

About Ross Baird

Ross Baird is the founder and CEO of Village Capital, a firm that finds and invests in entrepreneurs solving the most important problems in society. Since founding Village Capital in 2009, Ross has supported hundreds of entrepreneurs in over 50 countries. Ross has spent his entire career on the founding team of start-up enterprises or investing in startups. In addition to his work with entrepreneurs worldwide, Ross also serves on the faculty of the University of Virginia, where he teaches entrepreneurship and impact investing. He has an MPhil from the University of Oxford, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and a BA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Truman Scholar and Jefferson Scholar.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Glen on January 15, 2018

I won this book in a goodreads drawing. A book that examines why so much of our country's new inventions are geared for such a narrow class of people, focussing on apps instead of actual advances in technology. The answer is a bunch of people with degrees that don't actually know how to do their jobs,......more

Goodreads review by Kyle on February 02, 2019

I first heard about Village Capital when I was an intern at the University Venture Fund in 2015. From there, I’ve always respected them as a firm from afar and had the chance to go to one of their events at Autodesk this year to better connect investors and social entrepreneurs. As part of the event......more

Goodreads review by SJ on November 19, 2017

The most useful thing in this book is the VIRAL pathway, which is a way to describe company maturity for venture-backed businesses. It gives a start-up and an investor a common way to measure where you currently stand and where you’re trying to go. This is key: [URL not allowed] The Two C......more

Goodreads review by John on November 18, 2017

One-pocket investing The concept of two-pocket investing vs one-pocket investing that Ross talks about in the book is interesting. Moving to a one-pocket mindset is like making sure you are one whole-person, not one type of person at work and another type of person at home.......more

Goodreads review by Conor on September 09, 2017

"The idea that entrepreneurship is a meritocracy is a myth." Ross Baird bases his debut book, The Innovation Blind Spot, on the premise that capital fails to flow to the most innovative and useful new ideas. Instead, he argues, "money flows to the ideas that are the most convenient to find or the mo......more