Ben Wianecki
Professor Bylund
EEE-2083
7 September 2022
Joy is what every inventor and entrepreneur dreams of becoming. She saw a problem that at the time only people in her position would struggle with. Being the inventor she is, starting with the dog collar, Joy took to her daughter’s crayons and drew up her idea. Joy was faced with obstacles after obstacle just like all other entrepreneurs. However, unlike some entrepreneurs she stuck to her guns and never gave in to a challenge. What interested me the most about this movie was not so much the fact that she made a new and exciting mop, but that it showed persistence and adaptability are key for Entrepreneural success. Some of the challenges Joy had to overcome most people would have stopped well before it began. For example, Joy had financial struggles all her life with her father assisting with the payments on her house and supporting her ex-husband and their children. Having this financial burden would have scared the average person away from even thinking about inventing a product. Another example could be later in the movie where joy was faced with rising costs in production. What Joy chose to do was not just pay the rising costs since there was an agreement. She stayed persistent and did not roll over. She went to the production factory in California and confronted them about the increase demanding that they follow the agreement. When they disagree, joy demands to see the molds for her product, and they give her an excuse. Joy then takes it upon herself to go and investigate the factory and finds reverse engineered plans to go behind her back and steal her idea. This can be related back to Francisco D'Anconia's speech where he describes looters. In this situation the factory and owner in Texas are the looters and Joy is the person giving value. During this same scene I can also relate this to chapter 3 in The Seen, the Unseen, and the Unrealized. When Joy went to California it was due to a rise in production costs she saw as unfair. In chapter three we learned about the scarcity of resources, and due to this, them being utilized for certain means of production. Her actions in California were joy bidding for resources. The resources being the plastic and the molds. I found both of these aspects interesting since when watching the movie, I recognized instantly due to the readings, how they relate to entrepreneurship. These both are real life examples from the book and the speech. The reason these are entrepreneurial is because we are able to see what problem she is trying to solve and how she is solving it. Part of being an entrepreneur is being faced with a challenge big or small and being able to overcome it to solve the bigger problem.
Elaborating on the relationship Joy has with society is the fact that she is a mother/caretaker just like most woman during that time period (1990). This gave her a unique insight and appealed to the ethos of those watching her on tv advertisement. Another problem she was faced with was, initially her product was being advertised by a man who did not know anything about it. This did not grab the attention of the audience since they could not see the potential it had. However, when Joy was presenting her mop on air, she was able to give the reasons behind her inventing this fresh style of mop. This gave the views at home practical examples of how this could benefit and streamline their process. Having Joy as the presenter for the mop added value for the consumer just like what we have been talking about in class, Value > Price > Cost. We saw the results of this when the male salespeople had 0 sale while Joy had thousands of sales for their respective commercials.
Society affected the aspect of Joy bidding for resources since joy predicted the value consumers would have in her product. We talked about how entrepreneurs have to predict what consumers will value in class and how these predictions could lead to failure or success. Since Joy was the repair person, cook, and every other aspect of her household she could see the need for improvement in the tools used to clean and how this new tool could revolutionize how people cleaned their homes as well as saving them money. Society created this need, giving Joy the opportunity to invent something. We also saw that they supported her work through their purchasing power. When the product was explained properly, they saw the value within it and saw it was greater than the cost. You could say that joy predicted the need for the new style of mop correctly.
This interaction is not something we can see like 2 people exchanging goods. It also is not an interaction that society will see since it happens without their knowledge. This is due to it involving all producers (entrepreneurial consumers) and manufacturers. The manufacturers hold scarce resources, in this particular case the plastic and rope used to construct the product, most importantly the molds to create the product. The entrepreneurial consumers (producers) are those with the ideas and are the ones solving the problem for society. The interaction between these people as said in class is like an auction. The entrepreneurial consumers are trying to get access to the scarce resources at the same time other entrepreneurial consumers are. This creates the bidding effect of an auction driving the production cost for everyone up. This creates the bottom line the entrepreneurs need to meet that sets the lowest possible price they are willing to accept for their products. But what this also does for society is take away resources that could have been used in the future or even the present to create other goods. So, these interactions are particularly important to what direction society moves in. In this case the costs aligned so that Joy could create the mop.