How to See, Solve, Scale with Danny Warshay

Whether you have dreams of starting the next global enterprise, you’re considering a side hustle, or you’re just looking to be more innovative in your corporate day job, building an entrepreneurial skill set is something that can benefit every one of us.

 

Danny Warshay, Executive Director of the Nelson Center for Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at Brown University, joined me today to discuss his new book See, Solve, Scale.

 

In this interview, we discuss how entrepreneurship is grounded in listening well and solving problems creatively. He shares his favorite strategies for turning an unsolved problem into a breakthrough success.

 

Listen to the full conversation on Apple, Spotify, your favorite podcast platform, or just click play on the audio player above.

Entrepreneurship is a structured process

 

“Sometimes people think…[entrepreneurial skill is] something that you're born with; it's congenital; that you're able to be an entrepreneur just by virtue of being born with a talent. And I know for a fact that is not true. I know everybody is born with the innate ability to be an entrepreneur,” he began.

“Entrepreneurship is a structured process.”

 

• The first step is See. This is effectively looking around, paying attention, and spotting real opportunities, pain points, or holes in the marketplace that even the end-user or customer may not realize they need.
• The second step is Solve. This is what “you might call invention. There’s certainly creativity involved.” But it’s invention with intention. “Too often, tech people are starting with a potential solution and hoping to stumble into a problem they can address.” There is “some structure about the creativity. It uses things like nominal group technique and systematic inventive thinking.” Often these solutions don’t emerge from big “eureka” moments, but rather moments in which you might say “huh, that’s funny.”
• The third step is Scale. And here the focus is on delivering real impact over the long term. Because something could be impactful but short-lived. And we’d call this a fad.

How can we apply this process in a corporate environment?

Not everyone is or aspires to be an entrepreneur in the traditional sense. But there are ways to infuse this structured, creative problem-solving methodology into the work we’re doing for a...

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