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The Enterprise Project is a research and dissemination initiative of Dave Lash & Company to translate patterns of entrepreneurial success into practical concepts and techniques for starting and growing innovative enterprises, both large and small.

Highly successful entrepreneurs throughout history have followed four unexpected, but remarkably consistent and logical patterns. We call these practices the PLUS Patterns. They have been the heart of our strategy and innovation consulting for over five years. We also offer lively hour-long presentations and day-long workshops.

Our vision for this Web site is to build over time a free, public resource -- rigorously research-based and designed for easy access -- where anyone can learn the four patterns employed by great entrepreneurs from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates, from Walt Disney to Steven Spielberg, and from Clara Barton and the founding of the American Red Cross to Muhammad Yunus and the creation of microlending.

Each of these individuals, and thousands of others, started with modest means. At the outset, each lacked a grand idea. Very few wrote a business plan. Instead, they became masters of adaptation and metamorphosis:

  • Plussing their way from one near-term opportunity to the next;
  • Leveraging their skills and assets in increasingly sophisticated and uncommon ways;
  • Upstreaming their attention and actions on emerging needs and trends; and
  • Spanning disparate ideas and resources assembled through proactive cultivation.

Anyone can learn these techniques. For more information about advancing your enterprise, please visit www.davelash.com and contact Dave by phone or email.

The PLUS patterns are valuable tools for repairing, renewing, or reinventing an enterprise in the face of today's economic difficulties. For more, see Dave's blog www.recessioneering.com.
ABOUT THE RESEARCH
Dave Lash is a strategy and innovation consultant with 30 years of experience in designing and implementing new initiatives. Since 1997, he has been part of an national research-based initiative to identify and disseminate patterns of entrepreneurial success to business leaders throughout the USA. Dave has worked with leading entrepreneurs, researchers, and educators, and the fruits of those collaborations inform The Enterprise Project and his consulting.

Empirical research on entrepreneurial practice is relatively new and what we are learning often flies in the face of conventional wisdom. For example, while imitating another business is the most common enterprise strategy, it rarely leads to long-term success and growth.

Furthermore, while the predictive (business plan first) approach embraced by business schools and the venture capital community has application in certain high-potential, high uncertainty situations, it is rarely employed by successful entrepreneurs starting with modest means.

What the empirical research shows is that our most innovative enterprises utilize a third approach which we call adaptive enterprising. The most in-depth description of this approach is Amar Bhide's The Origin and Evolution of New Businesses. We have built on his work with the findings of dozens of other researchers as well as our own pattern-finding investigations.

The PLUS Patterns are the result. Organized according to Christopher Alexander's pattern language quidelines, "Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice."

Dave Lash & Company, 73 Lake Shore Avenue, Hamilton, Massachusetts 01982, 978-468-6633
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