Salience

From Wikipedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, we find this:

Salience refers to the relative importance or prominence of a piece of a sign. The relative salience of a particular sign when considered in the context of others helps an individual to quickly rank large amounts of information by importance and thus give attention to that which is the most important. This process stops an individual from becoming mentally overloaded with data.

What is meant by a "sign" is a "tag," a label that represents the thing that's tagged. Price is a common tag. Quality is another one. Color, and so on. People, things, and ideas have tags on them put their either consciously by a person or collectively by all those who are aware of that person, thing, or idea. Sometimes we don't even realize the tags we wear. They're like food we spill on ourselves without realizing it until somebody tells us we have food on our shirt.

In an entrepreneurial context, salience refers to what users or customers of a given product or service think is important. Salience can vary from low to high. If price is very important, that is an object has high salience, your product or service better cost about the same as competing products or services. If you charge more, you have to make sure customers are getting something when they buy yours than customers are getting when they buy the other person's.

What do you think about this? I'd like to know. Read the Wikipedia article and the references cited there. Also Google it. And post a comment.

Entrepreneurship 2.0 is my entrepreneurship course. The ideas in it supply the life's blood of my professional activities: teaching, writing, and real estate. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot/com.

Information and Entrepreneurs

Information is key to everyone, entrepreneurs maybe more so. Wikepedia, the free, on-line encyclopedia, describes information as:

"The state of a system of interest, any represented pattern, any type of pattern that influences the formation or transformation of any other patterns."

Anyone interested in this should read the entire Wikipedia article and go to its references and links.

Information can be anything: the number of angels on the head of a pin, the weather forecast, the attitudes of a spouse, the number of widgets you sold last month. Brown and Duguid, in The Social Life of Information (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2002), include in it "the fuzzy stuff around the edges--context, background, history, common knowledge, social resources" (p. 1). Their point is that too often we "tunnel through." To quote them:

But this stuff around the edges is not as irrelevant as it may seem. It provides valuable balance and perspective. It holds alternatives, and ignore the fuzzy stuff which holds alternatives, offers breadth of vision, and indicates choices. It helps clarify purpose and support meaning. Indeed, ultimately it is only with the help of what lies beyond it that any sense can be made of the information that absorbs so much attention. (pp. 1-2)

Entrepreneurs have to keep their view wide and not suffer from tunnel vision, not rely on data to the extent that they ignore context and background. And above all, they have to see information as more than data.

This is my entrepreneurship course. If something grabbed you, post a comment. Entrepreneurship informs everything I do. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing and publishing go to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com