The myth of the knowledge economy

Tom Szaky, for example, built an international “green” business, Terracycle, ignorant of the required technology for converting worm excrement into fertilizer. He was completely naïve to the ways to package and sell the product, not to mention finance his early investments. He learned by doing: by jumping in, by making small mistakes and a few big ones, and by using his native intelligence and scrappiness to invent solutions to unexpected problems. Slowly, the landscape became clear. Szaky not only discovered the nature of this particular economic environment, he invented the environment itself.