An atom is a basic unit of matter.  A bit is a single numeric value, either ‘1’ or ‘0’, that encodes a single unit of digital information. A byte is a sequence of bits; usually eight bits equal one byte.

During the course of an interview an informant made the comment that he operates with or manages atoms, as compared to the people in other parts of the entrepreneurship village who operate with or manage bits and bytes.  I thought this was an interesting way to characterize the major tribes in the Yale entrepreneurship village: the atoms, and the bits and bytes.

This informant’s worldview of entrepreneurship is informed by innovating through the creation of physical artifacts in the real world, as compared to innovating through the creation of digital information in the on-line or virtual world.  This way of thinking about innovation is instructive for me because it lends a perspective to how to think about innovators and designers.   Much of the discussion in the press about entrepreneurship centers around businesses based on bits and bytes.  For sociological analysis of groups and individuals these distinctions might work, but I believe that many innovations are hybrids. They are based on atoms, something tangible, something you can touch, but they run on software based on bits and bytes, something intangible.

P.S. The Yale Entrepreneurial Institute (“YEI”) announced that online “personal assistant” venture PrepWork (YEI ’12) has been acquired by HubSpot, a inbound marketing software company. PrepWork’s acquisition marks the third exit in YEI history. During his YEI fellowship, Dan Wolchonok (SOM ’13) developed a product that pulled information from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and other social media websites and synced them to the customer’s calendar application.