MGMT 638
Class #3
Expanding the Entrepreneurial Class
Education in entrepreneurship- We need to think differently about education. Formal education is not enough. Most college courses focus on business plan writing skills rather than what it really takes to get a business up and running -> 2 programs: Startup Weekend & The Launch Pad, where success businesspeople help aspiring entrepreneurs start their own business.
What’s holding Americans back from launching more start-ups? Risk, fear of failure & uncertainty, lack of financing
Start-up rates among young people double since recession-because if young people can’t find a job, they create one for themselves.
Entrepreneurial Orientation: An applied perspective
-EO: The processes, practices, and decision making styles of firms that act entrepreneurially. The 5 dimensions are:
Autonomy: independent action to bring forth an idea
How can this happen in an organization? Spinning-off a division, which provides these new units with their own budgets, employees, etc.
Competitive aggressiveness: intensely and directly challenge its competitors. Examples include: price cutting and sacrificing profitability, increased spending on marketing, quality, or production capacity. But don’t want to destroy opportunities for future collaboration in the process.
Innovativeness: firm engages and supports novelty, new ideas, creative processes and experimentation which lead to new products, services, or processes. Inventiveness on the other hand is necessary, but not sufficient for innovativeness. Inventing a product that has no chance of commercialization is useless (inventiveness only focuses on the first half of innovativeness)
Proactiveness
In business what is the difference between proactive and reactive? Reactive strategies respond to some unanticipated event only after it occurs, while proactive strategies are designed to anticipate possible challenges.
Risk taking-tendency to engage in high-risk projects...