I would argue the seriously new and disruptive changes come from execution, not strategy, for the simple reason that truly disruptive changes come from unexpected responses to the heretofore unknown.

At the risk of entering a conversational black hole…

It's not so easy to say strategy trumps execution or vice versa in an endeavor, although I'm definitely guilty of that. There is evidence that a firm with solid execution and poor strategy has less chance of short run success versus a firm with good strategy and poor execution. Think MySpace or Friendster. Or even think Twitters problems in the beginning. A truism I had a professor tell me once is that “you can buy execution…if you can buy it and so can your competitors then it's not strategy.” The strategy vs. execution thing gets more blurry in the long run as more operational efficiencies correlate more strongly to success (eg profitability). Compare the lack of strategy, but superb execution, displayed by Japanese car manufacturers (circa 1985) with their German counterparts. These are the Michael Porter debates, rehashed, but the general idea I take from it is that you really have to be excellent at operationalizing a solid strategy.

As it relates to smaller-scale entrepreneurs, the point is that strategy or execution is more important based on the innovation model the entrepreneur is pursuing. If an entrepreneur is going for marginal improvements or expansion for an existing offering, sure, execution is key. But if you're going for something seriously new and disruptive, it's got to be strategy. That's even sorta from the tao of Google. We have to agree that early adopters will put up with more headaches if the strategy is genuinely new.

In short response to your first question about entrepreneurs staying with a firm to lead to its success, I think this goes back to the strategy vs. execution continuum. In my opinion, the early stages of a venture involve 90% market focus. This is where the strategy is set and the venture is defined. Over time, that 90% declines as more focus is placed on financial structure, growing pains, new management teams, etc. The founder has less role and influence over strategy and therefore less to add to the company.

Your compensation question is a great one and one I have to think long about.

While employees may be more fungible, founders (benevolent dictators, if you wish) may be even more important.

I would say entrepreneurial success has always fallen more on execution than strategy.

Leading me to ask, what is a “strategy” entrepreneur?

I'm betting on collaboration driving an increasing share of value creation; the real question is how economic returns and accounting profits will flow to the hubs (entrepreneurs, founders) and the edges (employees, fans, customers). Can compensation be distributed / allocated by the edges rather than the hubs? What collaboration structures will be most effective and efficient? What metrics do we / will we pay attention to and use?

My struggle is with “ideas as a platform”. I truly believe that is the case we're dealing with everyday. The platform may be easily co-opted by lots of people and used in other ways. The entrepreneur has little protection against this, save legal action.

It seems to me that what we're going to see is more open-source strategy and value creation will shift more towards execution for a highly targeted audience. This underscores the funding dilemma you've been talking about as well.