A Few Unicorns Are No Substitute For A Competitive, Innovative Economy (Gary Hamel, HBR)

So we’ve built this whole system to find the Next Great Unicorn that will save our local economy, sucking up hundreds of millions of dollars of public and private money. Is this strategy realistic or a waste of time, money and effort?

By design, Unicorns can only succeed if they establish a monopoly by being the sole receiver of all transactions in its market. But the moment you become a monopoly, you cease to be entrepreneurial. The game is no longer to add value but rather to defend the monopoly position. We’re seeing now how even the unicorn of all unicorns Facebook is growing out of their geeky teenage mindset and behaving like just another corporate behemoth.

Gary Hamel’s piece in HBR starts off by making a good point about how unicorns don’t contribute to the economy and actually stifle innovation. And that it’s harder and harder for a startup to achieve unicorn status, anyways.

But then he makes a mistake in pointing out how Amazon is diversifying by encouraging lots of little startups (Whole Foods?). Continue reading