14 lessons from Entrepreneurs on Starting Your Business

Start-up companies are critical to the world economy.

Fourteen participants in the World Economic Forum’s Technology Pioneers community came together to share their insights about successful entrepreneurship.  

Andreas Konig, CEO and co-founder of Proglove, explains that his company developed an integrated bar code scanner and glove after learning that BMW factory workers perform a million scans a day. Sparing them having to pick up and put down the scanner each time saves four seconds per scan. Because a second is worth about a dollar in this setting, that translates to an estimated savings of $4 million dollars per day. Konig learned the power of micro-efficiency and human-centered design, and monetized the value of technology that helps people and machines collaborate.

Ben Lamm knows his interests and abilities lie in starting new enterprises and letting someone else scale them, as he did with Hypergiant, an AI company that works with infrastructure and the defense and space industries. His lesson is to figure out what...