An entrepreneur is like a sculptor who sees the shape in the stone block before he begins. Apple saw the Macintosh in Xerox Alto. This is what distinguished Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs died at the age of 56. Judging from his achievements, he had a lot of fun on earth. He changed our lives. He introduced us to the Apple Macintosh series, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad. Jobs was an entrepreneur. With this perspective, there are two types of people in the world: those who talk about how hard it is to find a shovel and those to immediately start planning how to organize the process when you mention a gold mine. Jobs was in the second group. This is to what entrepreneurship refers. An entrepreneur sees and does what is inexistent. An entrepreneur is a person who can create value out of an idea. We have been talking about entrepreneurship lately. Today let me tell you the straight low on this issue and stress what Turkey needs these days.

Every institution has an establishment story. Or I should say: Every successful institution has an establishment story. If you do not have a story, you make one up. The legend does not necessarily reflect the reality. It is enough “to highlight the essence.” No myth is complex. The establishment story of Apple successfully summarizes what distinguished Steve Jobs. It was 1979. Jobs was only 24. He had established Apple Computer with Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne only three years before. Despite this, Apple was a company well known in the Silicon Valley, California.  In 1979 Jobs bought the right to visit Xerox Parc in Palo Alto to see the entire facility and to have a briefing. Xerox Parc was the research and development company of Xerox. In return for this three-day visit, Jobs granted Xerox the right to buy 100,000 shares of Apple at the price of $10 a share.

Those who said that granting Jobs the right to visit Xerox Parc was like letting the fox in the chicken coop were proved right. During this visit Jobs saw the gold mine. Thanks to the visit, Apple made 300 shareholders billionaires. During his visit to Xerox Parc, he was attracted by the Xerox Alto, one of the first personal computer prototypes that had been developed in the Xerox Alto labs in 1971 but was not in commercial production. In an era when you needed to enter code on the screen to make the computer process an action, the Xerox Alto only required a mouse click. Clicking on icons on the desktop, you could go to new pages. Just like in Macintosh. Jobs left the facility making plans on how to produce a mouse at low cost. He tried to find out how he can produce a mouse at a cost of $15 against Xerox's $300. In 1983, the Apple Macintosh was introduced at a low price and with a mouse. You were able to go to new pages by clicking on the screen. This ended the era of writing code to command the computer. The mouse became a commercial product accessible to everyone.

Now let me give the moral of the story. First, the mouse was the invention that democratized computer usage and enabled everyone use computers, connected the world and irreversibly changed society. My four year old niece Ela immediately looks for my iPad when she comes to our place, and says, “Güven, where is your touch screen computer?” just because of its ease of use. Ease of use is glamorous. It closes the digital gap between societies and social classes, and increases computer literacy. Jobs had a huge place among the people enabling this. This is the first point to state.

And the second one: sitting on a gold mine is not enough for becoming rich. You first have to recognize that you are sitting on a gold mine. There was almost a decade between the designing of the Xerox Alto and the commercial success of the Macintosh. At the outset, what mattered was to understand the importance of the idea rather than the idea itself. You can see the answer only if you are occupied with the correct question. In Jobs’ case, three days was enough for this.

The third point is about Turkey. The challenge for Turkey is not the insufficiency of R&D activities. The country has a rich collection of fundamental research. Inventions are made all around. However, R&D activities cannot be turned into practical projects. This is why the pool of private firms that spends on R&D has not grown. What is missing in Turkey is to make commercial success out of inventions and to turn an invention into technology. An entrepreneur is like a sculptor seeing the shape in the stone block before he begins. Apple saw the Macintosh in the Xerox Alto. This is what distinguished Steve Jobs.

In addition, there is no problem with our genes. The biological father of Jobs was from our former territory Syria. Turkey’s problem is about the ecosystem, which carefully destroys the ideas of entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship is an asset per se. An entrepreneur is someone who can get it done.

This commentary was published in Radikal daily on 07.10.2011