Generalists Make Better Entrepreneurs, Says Stanford Study

Entrepreneurs must be generalists, according to Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Edward Lazear. He has been studying data from a 1997 survey of about 5,000 Stanford MBA alumni regarding their careers. Comparing entrepreneurs to those who ended up working for others, he found that the entrepreneurs:
- Had a greater variety of tasks in their past work experience
- Enrolled in a broader range of classes at Stanford

"This view of entrepreneurship is at odds with the intuition of those who believe that entrepreneurs are technical specialists who base their new companies on innovation," says Lazear. The Stanford data and information from two other studies "strongly rejects this view. To the extent that entrepreneurs are innovators, for the most part they are business innovators. The innovation may be as seemingly minor as recognizing that a particular street corner would be a good location for a dry cleaner. Most entrepreneurs are non-technical people who form businesses in non-technical fields."

You don't have to be an inventor or a technical genius to be a successful entrepreneur. You just have to offer the right product to the right people at the right time for the right price.