The Foundations of Digital Entrepreneur: Gutenberg to Zuckerberg

Vietnamese Version: https://kenkai.vn/giai-tri/tu-gutenberg-den-zuckerberg/

Key Points:

• Gutenberg (inventor of the printing press) to Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) represents a historical timeline.

• Gutenberg made it easier to share books and news, while Zuckerberg made it possible for people all over the world to connect online.

Sometimes innovation comes in an almost blinding flash of creative insight. More often those ideas result from a disciplined, strategic process of exploration and testing. Regardless of how innovation is born, the hard part is transforming that insight into a profitable business proposition. The most innovative and creative minds often fail as entrepreneurs.

The media industry is experiencing what the economist Joseph Schumpeter famously termed “creative destruction.” A new technology has rendered business models obsolete that until recently sustained century‐old media enterprises—from books and newspapers to television. Customers and investors are moving away from an aging industry, shifting their focus and resources to the new entrants. From the experience of other industries that have weathered “the gales of creative destruction,” we know that those who thrive in this new environment will need to adapt quickly.

New business models are beginning to emerge as leaders in both the academy and the industry explore ways to tap into the potential unleashed by this interactive, always‐on technology that connects media enterprises with their readers, viewers, and online visitors in revolutionary ways. Colleges and universities have established innovation and entrepreneurial centers that give students hands‐on experience with “ideation” and prototyping, and that, maybe—just maybe—will inspire one or more of them to come up with the next Facebook. Leaders of established, century‐old media empires commission innovation reports and encourage their employees to “think out of the box” about new ways to connect with current and potential customers.  All of this occurs as the pace of change in the industry has increased significantly in recent years and shows no sign of slowing down. Indeed, many prognosticators predict it will increase.

It is 1450 in the medieval town of Mainz in Central Europe.  A former blacksmith and engraver is seeking investors for a secret project he refers to simply as “the work of books.”  Until now, Johannes Gutenberg, the youngest son of aristocrats, has led a rather peripatetic life shuttling among cities along the Rhine River as he seeks to make his own fortune.  With money he inherited from his mother’s estate, he’s invested in a number of commercial ventures, including a plan to manufacture and sell handheld mirrors that are supposed to reflect a “holy light” on pilgrims visiting a 1439 exhibition of Emperor Charlemagne’s relics in Aachen. 

Unfortunately, floods delay the pilgrimage for more than a year. As with many of his ventures, the profit he envisioned never materializes. With his inheritance gone, he has returned to the city where he was born and sets up a workshop in a building owned by a distant cousin.

Far from being discouraged, Gutenberg, who is now in his early fifties, is once again dreaming of striking it rich. Over the past decade, he has acquired a grab bag of skills, including metallurgy, and has invented several new manufacturing processes that he hopes to use in this new venture of printing and selling Bibles.  But first, he needs an investor to advance him the funds. A local banker by the name of Johann Fust steps forward, lending Gutenberg 1,600 guilders (which is several hundred thousand euros in to-day’s currency). 

Fust also introduces him to Peter Schoeffer, who signs on as an apprentice. Using the calligraphy skills he has developed working as a scribe in Paris, Schoeffer begins designing the typeface for the Bible while Gutenberg, the alchemist, attempts to bring all of his inventions together in a sequential printing process.

History recognizes Gutenberg as the inventor of the printing press. In fact, in his workshop, he invents, not one, but four separate products and processes. First, he develops a hand mold that he uses to cast individual letters of the alphabet.  Once his moveable letters are cast in metal, they are fitted into a frame, and used to make multiple impressions of the same word onto a page. He then turns his attention to ink and paper, experimenting with formulas, adjusting the viscosity of the ink so that it bonds firmly with the paper, which also must be just the right thickness so it will not be shredded by the metal type. As a final step, he invents a new type of press—one with a screw that can be manually tightened using a wooden handle that compresses the type onto a flatbed surface onto which the image will be imprinted.

It takes several years of experimentation and adjustment to get the printing process just right. All the while, Gutenberg employs more than 20 people in his workshop because producing a quality reproduction of the Bible is a huge undertaking. Setting the 42 lines of type on each of the 1,282 pages requires at least a half day. Gutenberg attempts to cover his day‐to‐day payroll and operating expenses by printing a variety of other less prestigious materials, including indulgences, pamphlets, poems, and a Latin grammar book. By 1455, Gutenberg is finally ready to go to market, having produced almost 180 copies of his masterpiece. He tentatively decides to charge the princely sum of 40 guilders for each Bible.

Unfortunately, his investor has grown impatient. Fust sues Gutenberg for 2,000 guilders, claiming that over the past three years he has made no inter- est payments on the original loan of 1,600. 

Gutenberg’s apprentice, Schoeffer, testifies for Fust, who prevails in court. In addition to receiving a financial settlement from Gutenberg, Fust is awarded possession of almost all of the Bibles that have been printed, as well as the equipment in the workshop.  With proceeds from the sale of the Bibles and using the tools and processes that Gutenberg had invented, Fust and Schoeffer set up their own workshop. In 1457, they become the first printers in Europe to publish a book stamped with their own branded imprint.  

On his own after Fust’s death a decade later, Schoeffer becomes one of Europe’s most successful and famous early printers, publishing his own version of the Bible, as well as catalogues and dictionaries that are sold through a far‐flung network that stretches across the western half of the continent.

In contrast, Gutenberg’s finances are apparently in tatters. In the years after the lawsuit, Gutenberg continues doing some minor print work, maybe even furnishing type for another Bible produced in 1459. He dies around the age of 70 in 1468, unknown outside his small circle of friends and former associates, the significance of his innovations largely unrecognized. He is buried in a churchyard cemetery near Mainz that has since been destroyed, his gravesite lost to posterity.

Gutenberg was the original “disruptive innovator.” His inventions and improvements wrenched civilization from the age of the scribe whose works were available only to an elite few into a secular age of mass‐produced, widely circulated texts that spawned social, political, and economic revolutions. Today, there are statues of Gutenberg throughout Europe, a university named after him, and a museum dedicated to him and his inventions in his hometown, right across from the imposing, 1,000‐year‐old Mainz Cathedral, under the spires where he set up his now famous workshop. In 2000, at the dawn of the third millennium, both scholars and journalists for the popular press that his inventions fostered proclaimed Gutenberg as one of the most important figures in the history of mankind.

Yet it was not until 50 years after his death that Gutenberg was finally acknowledged in historical texts as the inventor of typography and modern printing processes. From the vantage point of the twenty‐first century, it is instructive to contemplate the supreme ironies of Gutenberg’s life and the lessons it holds for today’s digital innovators and entrepreneurs. Why were his innovations in printing processes and products—which revolutionized communication—unrecognized during his lifetime? Why did the world’s first media innovator fail to capitalize financially on his own transformative inventions and become a successful media entrepreneur?