[MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC] 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. [MUSIC]
