No one knows exactly the formula for making an entrepreneur. I'm pretty sure entrepreneurs are made as well as born. Also, I believe everyone in business has to have something of the entrepreneur about them these days. Call it being fully engaged with the business. We're all looking for ways to improve the customer experience, create efficiencies, grow the business.
An important characteristic of entrepreneurs is that they see connections before others do. They spot gaps in structures or processes where other people fail even to see the structures or processes. They view everything around them as potentially valuable. In their imaginations, they reconfigure the world, and make something new. They may invent something completely new and never seen before. But the new addition usually requires many pre-existing components, pathways, agents, or technologies, in order to function.
The entrepreneurial mindset sees standards as assets to be exploited. Finding a data standard for the domain you want to act in is like discovering free, robust infrastructure. Parts of or even whole data standards can often be applied to novel domains, giving entrepreneurs a fast start in a new market.
When we encourage leaders to look to standards to accelerate their goals, we're asking them to think like entrepreneurs. Exploiting data standards doesn't make you a geek, it's the smart thing to do.