In the 1949 film "The Fountainhead", and aspect of entrepreneurship I found interesting is innovation and creative destruction. In the movie, architect Howard Roark is a man who comes up with very unique and innovative architectural designs, and he is very stubborn in which he only allows his designs to be built under the condition that they are excepted exactly as he designs them. He struggles to find anyone willing to allow him to design their buildings, as everyone always says he should just conform to what society expects out of building designs. He speaks with a man named Ellsworth Toohey, who works under Gail Wynand for the New York Banner newspaper, who runs a campaign after meeting with Roark to ensure that he doesn't get any jobs to build anything in the city. He ends up working at a quarry instead of conforming, and eventually finds a man willing to let him build something a bit bigger, the Enright House. He is mocked for the design as it is very modernistic and everyone else believes that they should simply listen to what the current society would want and like in a building design. He struggles to get any other big projects but does find work in some smaller office buildings and gas stations. Eventually he designs a housing place for an architect named Peter Keating, who couldn't come up with any designs near as innovative as Roark, under the condition that his design stays the way he designed it. The board or group of people behind the housing place goes against their contract with Peter and changes Roark's design, so he devises a plan and blows up the construction site. He goes to trial and fights for the work of individualists and actually wins, and avoids jail. The reason that this story relates to entrepreneurship is because Roark knew that society would at first not accept his innovative designs, but never conformed because he knew that individuals are what cause the greatest innovations to society, and was ready to go to jail for it (I'm skipping over the romance plot with Dominique Francon and the plot with Gail because those don't really matter for the entrepreneurial aspect of this film).
The reason that this aspect of entrepreneurship is interesting in this film is because it shows exactly what we have discussed in class about how the owners of the old methods always fight tooth and nail to not let innovations and individual entrepreneurs creatively destroy them through new and never before thought of ideas. Roark was always told his designs were too modern and interesting or that he needed to change aspects of them to find a "middle ground", when Roark knew that his designs were perfect exactly as he designed them originally. I really liked how in the end he beat society and rose to build Wynand's greatest skyscraper, effectively completing the process of what creative destruction is, and he finally got to put his name on a huge project.
This aspect of entrepreneurship affects society by pushing the boundaries of what people believe to be the best options. The average person in society couldn't think of what technologies and innovations will be the norms in the next 10 years, they only see what is in the present. Entrepreneurs have to do what is almost the impossible by coming up with ideas and technologies and designs that outright beat the best options of the present times. We have discussed this in class a lot recently with how entrepreneurs are always thinking of new ways to use the same materials to make society happy in the future, and Roark is doing exactly that in this film by coming up with much more interesting and beautiful designs than the boring old ones. Society oftentimes stifles this innovation because it cannot see the future in what they value like how the entrepreneur strives to do, just like how in the film the entire city was against Roark and wanted him in prison. Society also stifles innovation by having the top dogs in the business world always searching to steal from the individual and ensure they cannot rise above them with new innovations. The interaction between this aspect and society is one that many times goes against improving innovations, such as how Roark was always shoved down. However, just like how Uber managed to disrupt the cab industry, Roark blew up the housing place and ended up winning in the end.
