In the 2015 film "Joy", starring Jennifer Lawrence, an aspect of entrepreneurship that I found in the movie that was interesting to me was when Joy, played by Jennifer Lawrence, was going through the process of getting her unique mop from the idea phase to having it actually making her money. In the movie, Joy is a single mother who lives with a bunch of her family members, including her ex-husband and the two children they have together. Joy was always influenced by her grandmother, Mimi, who always encouraged Joy to make things and be super creative and imaginative. Mimi always exclaimed that Joy would be the one to lead her family essentially out of poverty. While on a boat trip with her family, her father Rudy's new love interest, Trudy, very explicitly says to not spill red wine on the deck of the boat, as it is a special finish and the boat belonged to her now deceased husband, yet of course the boat rocks and Joy ends up having to mop up red wine she accidentally spilled when she drops her glass on the deck. This ends up with Joy having to wring the mop head out herself, which in turn cuts her hands from the glass shards left on the mop head. This is what gives Joy her idea for a better type of mop, one that can wring itself out and be washable. But it wasn't as simple as coming up with the idea: Joy had to first borrow money from Trudy's to get the patent to become official, and then she had to deal with using more money to come up with the finished design, to then have to go through getting arrested and storming into a television executive's meeting among a bunch of other hoops. But in the end, she sold a lot of mops as well as a bunch of other patent designs she came up with. This is entrepreneurship/entrepreneurial because it is the first step in the process of being an entrepreneur, which is coming up with an idea that fills a gap in the market or that is a creative new way of solving some sort of issue.
The reason that this aspect of entrepreneurship is so interesting in the film is because in the film it builds up this story of Joy and how her life is, where she is carrying her family and cleaning up the house herself all the time from many different issues. It paints Joy perfectly where the audience can easily see how Joy has first hand experience with cleaning tools and would know exactly what would make a mop better than the standard ones on the shelves beforehand. I really love this aspect of entrepreneurship, as it shows that anyone can really be an entrepreneur, and how the everyday lives of different people can lead to really creative and innovative ideas on how to fix any type of problem that society might have.
This entrepreneurial aspect has a big affect on society, as the more creative products and ideas that entrepreneurs come up with end up leading to competitors coming up with even better ideas, and vice versa. Entrepreneurs push technology to new limits in the world, as better and better products continue to release. This has a big affect on production as well, as new ideas and methods for producing products come out, some of them bring new technologies and cheaper methods of producing. This is huge as discussed in class, as lowering the price of one method of production can phase out another, as the costs of producing are almost more important than the prices of the actual outputted goods themselves. Sometimes quicker methods of production can arise from new ideas and technologies as well, which can in turn allow the production of one product be more beneficial than producing another, as time is another big factor in choosing between producing different items. As shown in the reading for class, sometimes coming up with an idea to use a material in production that is at the time not very used at all, can be extremely beneficial and cost efficient which just helps consumers in the long run.
How society can affect or stifle this aspect is shown in the film: Joy has one situation where she is trying to sell her mops in the parking lot of a grocery store, and the police come and confiscate some of her mops as well as the props she was using to sell them, as it is against the law to sell in the parking lot of the grocery store. This shows how there are many regulations put in place, as discussed in class, to limit and control the market and people trying to sell new ideas. Joy has another situation later in the film in which her producer begins to charge her an extra two dollars per mop made, which is only because the mop was starting to become really popular and make a lot of money, so they lie to her and say that her patent molds are wearing out every week which makes it more expensive. She ends up doing something really similar as what happened in the story brought up in class of the scooters on OSU's campus and how the company went against the rules and left a bunch of scooters around, which gave students the idea of petitioning to keep them even though they were originally against the rules. What she does is she sneaks into the manufacturing plant and finds her molds, and finds that the producer is actually trying to steal her design. This is similar to the OSU scooter story as because she broke the rules (those being that she was trespassing) she ended up realizing what was actually going on and later ended up beating the producer in the end for her design.
The interaction between entrepreneurs coming up with creative solutions and society in real life is sort of just like how it is shown in the movie: you have to come up with a new idea, and then you have to fully design it until it is ready, and then you have to figure out if nobody else already holds a patent for your design, which can take a long time which not many people might know. There are a lot of legal issues that have to be sorted out before a product can come to market, and talking with business and patent lawyers. And sometimes there are certain regulations put in place by the government, such as when we discussed in class how Uber was originally not allowed to be a ride share service because it would disrupt the taxi service too badly, which are made to heavily regulate entrepreneurship. Another part of the interaction is that a lot of the time people do not care for or see the use in new ideas and new creative products, and they fail because they were simply not easy enough to understand or that they were just not actually useful. Joy deals with this in the film briefly, when she fails to get the peoples attention the first time she gets time on air or also when she was selling in the parking lot of the grocery store initially.
