With the new technological era, ordinary entrepreneurs leave their places to innovative entrepreneurs and the old way of marketing has also started to change. Innovative entrepreneurs must have different skills to cope with challenges that come with this change. I am looking for insights about the new skills that innovative entrepreneurs must have in terms of marketing.
You might want to consider their social, technical, conceptual, and decision abilities and skills that enable them to exploit existing opportunities in unique ways or create new opportunities that are of value. For example, innovative entrepreneurs might be better off in marketing via social media due to their set of skills that combine technical, social, and conceptual skills. Overall, both cognitive and technical skills are crucial for both.
You are contrasting innovative entrepreneurs with ordinary entrepreneurs. I find it interesting.
You also assume entrepreneurs are better at marketing that the corporate world. Also interesting
To be based on viral marketing skills, design thinking, digital as well.
On my opinion the best combination of skills and knowledge for an innovative entrepreneur is: to possess a rich market knowledge about the future trends and digital marketing skills, but at the same time to employ creative thinking people for its team.
In believe you are thinking in a binary: ordinary versus innovative.
It can clear the noise if you think in gradation: low to high....
First, I would like to commend you on not simply assuming that all entrepreneurs are innovators. Someone who launches a business exploiting an underserved market is an entrepreneur but not an innovator, for example.
Innovators often are not the winners in a competition in the marketplace. There is can be a distinct second-mover advantage, particularly when it comes to creating the awareness of a need for a solution. You let the the first-mover absorb all the costs associated with the introduction of a new solution and the costs associated with building market awareness that there is in fact a need. In the technology adoption life cycle, the first-mover, cultivates the early adopters--expensive since it is typically involves a direct sales force--then a second-mover swoops in with a similar product to capture the early majority with a channel sales strategy, while the first-mover dies in the chasm, unable to fund the investment in a channel strategy, having blown the investors' funds on building the product and hiring the direct sales force.
The above example happens all the time in enterprise software (a space I have been in for 20+ years in big companies and startups).
The skill set for an innovative entrepreneur in my experience is not any different from a non-innovative entrepreneur. However, there are skills needed as the firm matures. There is a necessary "adult supervision" that typically gets injected by investors sitting on the Board of Directors at a certain stage (typically when the firm has brought a product to market). Processes need to be created to manage the startup. Rare are the founders who are able to remain in control of a company from startup to mature company. More typical is an early exit or failure to launch.
You may find in your research that marketing methods may be different (which is not the same thing as innovative marketing) such as cultivating social networks for transmitting marketing messaging at lower cost, but that is merely an artifact of low budgets compared to large established firms. Also, cultivating the early adopters is different at a micro level, than marketing to the early and late majority. The sales cycle is completely different. If you look at this through a Miller-Heiman lens, you have three main buyers: technical buying influences, economic buying influences and user buying influences. When marketing to early adopters you will mainly be cultivating technical buying influences. Once technology adoption has proceeded, and awareness of need is wide, it is economic buying influences and users who are cultivated in the sale. They have very different psychological profiles. Early adopters are adventurous techies. The majority are risk-averse people, who just want their problems solved. A "do you want fries with that" sales approach, perfect for channel sales, is much more typical. Channel sellers, are mainly useful for meeting a demand, not cultivating a demand, which is the role of direct consultative salespeople.
Hope this helps.
Cheers.
the innovation and the differentiation, are the essential factors......
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