Or, “Gladwell, Godin, Quantum Physics, and Entrepreneurship”.

I love it when seemingly unrelated things coincide in serendipitous ways. Four events over the last two weeks have collided in a particularly delightful fashion.

Thing 1: Malcolm Gladwell (of “Tipping Point” fame) spoke at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management today to a full house of MBA students, alumni, faculty, and some free-riding tailgaters like me. Gladwell is a U of T grad and a friend of Rotman’s dean, so he was on home ground. (By the way, he blogs occasionally; see here.)

Gladwell delivered a thought-provoking piece on creativity, dwelling in particular on the dichotomy between early-bloomer creatives like Picasso who peak near the beginning of their careers with a big bang followed by a years-long trail of quiet thunder, and late-bloomer creatives like Cezanne who continually refine a single theme, working up gradually over decades to finally reach a point of mass critical acclaim. Gladwell postulates that the western business world is increasingly focused on funding only those who show visible potential to be early bloomers, to the detriment and marginalization of late-blooming creative efforts.

He cited HBO’s Six Feet Under as an example of a show that took some years to catch on, and would never have been funded on mainstream TV, but is now extremely popular and profitable with a set of diehard fans. In contrast, mainstream media effectively forces artists down the early bloomer path, typically by funding them to do warmed-up rehashes of recipes that are known to work. Why? The risks of investing this way are visibly lower: the design methods are more formulaic and easier to explain, the market reactions are easier to predict, and the profits arrive (or fail to arrive) much faster. The downside is that we the customers get fed a stream of pablum.

Thing 2: Quantum Physics. Last week I got to spend time with Michele Mosca, an old Waterloo classmate who is now Deputy Director at the Institute for Quantum Computing and a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Mike graciously made time to tour me around Perimeter and talk about their ambitious plan to build a world-caliber organization for pushing forward the bounds of physics. Both Perimeter and ICQ invest in the kind of research that, in many cases, may take 15 years or more before it manifests itself in applications. Perimeter’s initial funding came largely from the personal donations of Mike Lazaridis and fellow RIM executives Doug Fregin and Jim Balsillie ($100M, $10M and $10M, respectively). Talk about investing and innovating for the long term. It was an incredibly impressive experience.

Thing 3: Seth Godin. I finally got around to watching Seth Godin’s recent presentation to Google. In it he talks about moving from “interruption marketing” (ads pushed at users regardless of their contextual wants and needs) to “permission-driven” marketing. He advocates the latter approach, in which customers actually want to hear marketing messages, provided they are personal, contextually relevant, and offered in response to an invitation. It’s a great talk, and if you care at all about how to market a concept, you should watch it.

Godin commended Google for growing their usage organically, by first building a service that was remarkably different and then encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations, rather than by plastering ads everywhere. It’s an approach that takes patience. When it works, it ultimately yields many customers who are insanely loyal evangelists for your product. He also warned Google that they need to move to the next step, and start asking customers for their permission to follow through with personalized, relevant marketing messages about their new offerings.

Thing 4: Entrepreneurship. The March ’06 Toronto DemoCamp event stimulated some interesting conversation about innovation and entrepreneurship in this region. One of the topics is whether it’s worth spending time reviewing demo ideas that come without business plans attached. I argue it is worthwhile: the demoers may eventually want help turning their ideas into businesses, and everyone else in the room is meanwhile benefiting by listening, learning, and building synergy between the demos and ideas of their own. It’s OK if the payoff isn’t immediate.

Conclusions: In a way, a tech community investing time and energy in nurturing its aspiring entrepreneurs is much the same as a formal organization investing time and money in nurturing and marketing long-term creative work. Both entities have important choices to make about how much attention to invest (attention ~= time ~= money), how risky to be with their investments, and how long to wait for commercial success. Striking the right balance is crucial. And good things – some of which may take a long, long time to develop – are worth waiting for.