24 Steps to a Successful Startup

Bill Aulet is convinced anyone can be an entrepreneur. The director of the Martin Trust Center For MIT Entrepreneurship recently published a how-to for budding business owners to guide them through the ups and downs of launching anything from an Internet start-up to a pizza shop: “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 steps to a successful startup.” Aulet, a former IBM executive who also helped launch several start-ups, spoke to the Globe’s Michael Farrell.

Not all startup companies are created equal. Although both innovation-driven enterprises (IDEs) and traditional small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can provide valuable products and services and create jobs, IDEs – startups focused on addressing global markets based on technological, process or business model innovation – can potentially create hundreds or even thousands of high-skill jobs if they succeed.

When we teach our introductory entrepreneurship class at MIT, we take it for granted that each of our 75 students will be able to start an American company upon graduating. But many of them lack one thing they need to be able to do so—permission from the United States government to continue working in our country.

Energy innovation and investing are exploding right now. Technological breakthroughs are seen as perhaps the greatest hope to solving our dire energy challenge. However, what is often overlooked is the link between finding or creating new sources of energy and the effects on food and water.

People in many industries will whine and complain about how their industry is so unique and more difficult than others, and so one has to sort through this groaning to find the truth. After some close analysis, though, I have concluded that for energy, unfortunately, it is definitely true. Energy entrepreneurship is much harder than entrepreneurship in other sectors, and I believe most investors have yet to come to grips with this fact.

Energy is, after all, the biggest industry on the planet and certainly faces the biggest challenges. Therefore, it offers the biggest and most attractive opportunities for investors and others who want to make a difference.