Square’s Cofounder on Discovering — and Defending — Innovations

HBR IdeaCast

Harvard Business Review

Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Communication, Marketing, Business, Business/management, Management, Business/marketing, Business/entrepreneurship, Innovation, Hbr, Strategy, Economics, Finance, Teams, Harvard

4.4 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 17 March 2020

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Jim McKelvey, entrepreneur and cofounder of Square, says that most companies that think of themselves as innovative are really just copycats. True innovation, he argues, is about fearlessly exploring novel solutions and dramatically expanding markets. Doing so also helps startups defend their innovations against industry giants, as Square did against Amazon. McKelvey is the author of the book “The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time.”

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you work with early career professionals, my colleagues at
0:03.8	HPR have a great new podcast for you. It's called New Here. Think of it like the
0:08.4	Young Professional's Guide to Building a Meaningful Career on your own terms.
0:11.9	Share New Here with the Young Professionals in your life. a meaningful career on your own terms.
0:12.8	Share new here with the young professionals in your life.
0:15.9	Listen for free wherever you got your podcasts.
0:18.6	Just search new here. Welcome to the HBR Ideacast from Harvard Business Review. I'm Kurt Nickish. One day a woman walked into Jim McElvey's glass-blowing studio and wanted to buy one of his art pieces, but he couldn't take her credit card. It was American Express, his
0:55.4	studio accepted only Visa or Mastercard. She left without buying anything.
1:00.3	Afterward, McElvie looked down at his phone and wondered to himself if an iPhone can be a book and a TV and a map and a jukebox, why can't it be a credit card reader?
1:12.0	That's where the mobile payment company, Square, was born.
1:16.1	McElby's not just a glass blow, or he's an engineer, too,
1:19.4	and he designed and hand-built a small credit card reader that plugged into the iPhone's
1:24.0	headphone jack. Today Square is a publicly traded company based in San Francisco
1:29.0	with billions of dollars in revenue. And McElvie says there are lessons in building that
1:34.3	business and others he's been involved in that any entrepreneur can learn from
1:38.9	starting with how we even understand words like innovation, disruption, and entrepreneur.
1:45.3	He's our guest today.
1:46.6	Jim McElvy is a co-founder of Square and the author of the new book, The Innovation
1:51.0	Stack, building an unbeatableable Business one crazy idea at a time.
1:55.0	Jim, thanks for coming on the show.
1:57.0	Kurt, so happy to be here. So what is wrong with that word entrepreneur? What do people get wrong about
2:10.4	entrepreneurship? Well it used to be a great word that was used to describe something other than business,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Harvard Business Review, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Harvard Business Review and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.