The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself

“This is the book that I often recommend to students who come to me with a true curiosity. It’s arguably more about innovation than about entrepreneurship per se. (Here we already have a question about whether entrepreneurs are innovators. Yes, a lot of them are, but not all of them. Are all innovators entrepreneurs? Absolutely not!). The Discoverers is about the origin of a lot of entrepreneurial activity, which is human curiosity…It looks at human history through the angle of innovation and how much people struggled to identify new ideas and concepts—ideas and concepts that we take for granted. It’s that process of struggle and going down the wrong lane and having all sorts of surprises along the path that is so intrinsic to the entrepreneurial process. Rather than starting with entrepreneurship itself, I want people to start there and get the really big picture of why we are doing this and why entrepreneurship is important for the world…My favourite part is about Christopher Columbus. That really is an entrepreneurial story. Here is an entrepreneur who spends a lot of time trying to find the money to do an exploration. He’s looking for the western route to the Indies. The notion of discovering a new continent never occurred to anyone in the entire process until they found land and in fact mistakenly took it for India. That is a beautiful analogy of the entrepreneurial process. First, you have to put a lot of effort in to get something going. And then when you get something going, something else can happen and it can turn into something completely different to what you expected.” Read more...

The best books on Entrepreneurship

Thomas Hellmann, Economist