New Word of the Week: Monocarpic
Last week i wrote about Palliative Treatment and thought about a way to adopt that medical terminology for entrepreneurial activities.
This week I found a biological term that might be useful.
Monocarpic
A term used to describe a plant that flowers and fruits once and then dies
It seems that a lot of plants or even trees are Monocarpic instead of Polycarpic. Bamboo can grow for 30 years and then bloom and die.
You could say that a Monocarpic business is a one time wonder. You could argue that V3.com (my first company) was a monocarpic business. It worked once, very well, but won’t work again. The opposite of a Serial Entrepreneur could be a Monocarpic Entrepreneur.
An idea might be extremely useful for one purpose and one time and sometimes it is better to bloom and fade away than keep repeating the same trick over and over again.
As always, I’m looking forward to hear from you on how you are going to use this word in your daily practices.
a few ideas for calling names on 1 hit wonders (clearly it doesn’t apply to you, boris):
monopreneur, monocarp, 1hitter….
grtz,
@gar
ps nice way to relate to former businesses you ran! no reason now for people getting tired of hearing the same old story from you
You could apply it to for instance great (guerrilla) marketing ideas: you can only use a great idea once to its fullest extent, so you’d better use it the best way possible! If you apply this principle in business, it forces you to make the best of every first time of doing something because it might not come around again, which is not a bad idea for forcing you to do the best you can.