In the 2016 film "The Founder", an aspect of entrepreneurship that I found interesting is the idea of creative destruction. In the film, a struggling salesman living an average life named Ray Kroc finds himself going from restaurant to restaurant trying to sell a mixer to make the process of making milkshakes go more quickly. No one wants to buy the mixer, except for one little restaurant out of California: "McDonalds". And they want multiple. He can't believe someone actually wants to buy multiple mixers, so he heads there himself to see whats going on. What he finds is a a revolutionary idea from the brains of Dick and Mac McDonald on how to make fast food restaurants better: speed everything up, and cutout everything thats unnecessary to the process. Ray took this idea, and grew it exponentially, whether Dick and Mac wanted that or not.
So what exactly is the creative destruction shown in the film?
The creative destruction is the idea that Mac and Dick formulated, which Ray executed on a massive scale: less carhops, quicker food. As shown in the film, this new restaurant style becomes the new craze as Ray expands McDonalds to over 10 states in the US and has people on their knees ready to operate their own McDonalds in their state.
Why is creative destruction entrepreneurial?
Because it is at the heart of innovation. The biggest leaps in innovation happen from new ideas and methods. They could have continued to optimize the horse and carriage but you know why they didn't? Because they are just downright worse than automobiles. Ray took an idea that he knew was disruptive and turned it into an empire.
Why is creative destruction, as shown in the film, such an interesting process?
The way that the film shows creative destruction was very well done in my opinion. Ray hated the process of carhops and old style fast food joints from the get-go and could see the McDonalds vision and knew it would be big, yet as Dick and Mac discussed it is not so easy to cause creative destruction; the two brothers tried their own hands at what Ray ended up accomplishing and ran into so many issues that they just gave up with it and thought the quicker food idea was unable to be executed in a franchise restaurant. Obviously Ray stayed determined and reaped the rewards. The story is just so interesting and the most interesting part was the process of this grand idea finally rising above the ashes of the carhops of yesterday.
Creative destruction as an entrepreneurial aspect affects society by improving upon the standards of living overall. As creative destruction brings upon new innovations, society is positively affected by that: faster food, better quality products overall, the internet, better cars, better tools for the people that make the products, etc. Life gets better as creative destruction happens. Does society support creative destruction? Well it depends. Sometimes society can not see the vision early on in the process of a new idea destroying an old one, and so the new idea fails, even if it was actually a good idea. This is shown in the film when Dick and Mac talked about how their first days with the new non-carhop design ended up not going so well. And sometimes when a new business rises up and causes the death of a fan favorite, it can cause outcry. And obviously sometimes society does support creative destruction, like for example when the electric scooter craze hit Oklahoma State University and the students petitioned for them to stay. The interaction between creative destruction and society is a process that seems like it starts with society not feeling the new ideas but eventually coming around to them when they really see it in practice, and then the true "destruction" part of the process happens.
