Entrepreneurship

Venturing prepares students to: - Create strategic market focus, through creative market segmentation, understanding perceived and latent needs, and benchmarking competitors′ product and service offerings. - Create value-rich products and services, developed by first formulating a new product and service strategy, and then, implementing the strategy with common platforms that leverage technology into closely related market applications. - Understand branding as a key competitive asset in technology-intensive markets. - Create a robust management team, where the founder quickly complements him or herself with fellow executives as skilled in different disciplines as he or she might be in technology or marketing. - Develop pragmatic financing strategies and business models that embrace a stream of venture financing, an appreciation and careful management of cash, and a clear understanding and planning of exit strategies for the entrepreneurial team.

Great entrepreneurs don't take risks. They manage them. If you need the best practices and ideas for launching new ventures but don't have time to find them this book is for you. Here are nine inspiring and useful perspectives, all in one place. This collection of HBR articles will help you: Zero in on your most promising prospects Set a clear direction for your start-up Test and revise your assumptions along the way Tackle risks that could sabotage your efforts Carve out opportunities in emerging markets Launch a start-up within your company Hand over the reins when it's time

What's your entrepreneurial profile? Do you have what it takes to build a great business? In this book, three prominent business leaders and entrepreneurs--now venture capitalists and CEO advisers--share the qualities that surface again and again in those who successfully achieve their goals. The common traits? Heart, smarts, guts, and luck. After interviewing and researching hundreds of business-builders across the globe, the authors found that every one of them--from young founder to seasoned CEO--holds a combination of these four attributes. Indeed each of us tends to be biased toward one of these traits in our decision-making, and figuring out which trait drives you will lead to greater self-awareness and likelihood of success in starting and growing a business. So are you: * Heart-dominant, like renowned chef Alice Waters or Starbucks's Howard Schultz? * Smarts-dominant, like Jeff Bezos of Amazon or legendary investor Warren Buffett? * Guts-dominant, like Nelson Mandela or Virgin's Richard Branson? * Or are you most defined by the luck trait, like Tony Hsieh of Zappos (and a surprisingly high proportion of other successful entrepreneurs)? Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck includes the first Entrepreneurial Aptitude Test (E.A.T), a simple tool to help determine your specific profile. Though no single archetype for entrepreneurial success exists, this book will help you understand which traits to "dial up" or "dial down" to realize your full potential, and when these traits are most and least helpful (or even detrimental) during critical points of a company lifecycle. Not only will you know how to build a better business faster, you'll also take your natural leadership style to the next level.

Another title in Silver Lake Publishers Small Business Series: an essential resource for starting a business today--after the hard lessons of the dot.com recession. Most entrepreneurs already know their businesses well and have common sense--what they need are fundamental, practical tools for creating successful systems within the business. This book shows them how, including: * background discussion of business structures * legal forms for filing necessary paperwork * general advice for getting started correctly * definitions of concepts, markets and market relationships * worksheets, standard letters, sample documents * a modular system for building the plans and reports that lenders and investors need.

Starting a business involves inevitable ups and downs, for first-time as well as experienced entrepreneurs. This updated, expanded edition by Jan Norman, one of the nation's foremost small business authorities, guides readers through every stage of business start-up, from planning to marketing. What No One Ever Tells You about Starting Your Own Business is designed for people who are launching a business, whether they be first-time entrepreneurs or people who have been tripped up by the start-up process before and want to do it right this time. Using the real-life experiences of 101 successful business owners, Norman combines practical, straightforward how-to advice with interesting and memorable narratives.

Innovative entrepreneurs are the prime movers of the economy. The innovative entrepreneur helps to overcome two types of institutional friction. First, existing firms may not innovate efficiently due to incumbent inertia resulting from adjustment costs, diversification costs, the replacement effect, and imperfect adjustment of expectations. The innovative entrepreneur compensates for incumbent inertia by embodying innovations in new firms that compete with incumbents. Second, markets for inventions may not operate efficiently due to transaction costs, imperfect intellectual property protections, costs of transferring tacit knowledge, and imperfect information about discoveries. The innovative entrepreneur addresses inefficiencies in markets for inventions through own-use of discoveries and adoption of innovative ideas. The Innovative Entrepreneur presents an economic framework that addresses the motivation of the innovative entrepreneur, the innovative advantage of entrepreneurs versus incumbent firms, the effects of competitive pressures on incentives to innovate, the consequences of creative destruction, and the contributions of the innovative entrepreneur to the wealth of nations.

As state support and federal research funding dwindle, universities are increasingly viewing their intellectual property portfolios as lucrative sources of potential revenue.  Nearly all research universities now have a technology transfer office to manage their intellectual property, but many are struggling to navigate this new world of university-industry partnerships. Given the substantial investment in academic research and millions of dollars potentially at stake, identifying best practices in university technology transfer and academic entrepreneurship is of paramount importance. The Chicago Handbook of University Technology Transfer and Academic Entrepreneurship is the first definitive source to synthesize state-of-the-art research in this arena. Edited by three of the foremost experts in the field, the handbook presents evidence from entrepreneurs, administrators, regulators, and professors in numerous disciplines. Together they address the key managerial and policy implications through chapters on how to sustain successful research ventures, ways to stimulate academic entrepreneurship, maintain effective open innovation strategies, and improve the performance of university technology transfer offices. A broad and ambitious work, the handbook offers comprehensive coverage for universities of all types, allowing them to confidently handle technology commercialization and further cultivate innovation.

University start-ups are unique in the world of business and entrepreneurship, translating research conducted at and owned by universities into market-ready products--a complex process that requires a combination of scientific, technical, legal, business, and financial skills to be successful. Start-ups have the potential to generate revenue for universities, enhance faculty recruitment and retention, create jobs, and create investment opportunities for venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Research to Revenue presents the first-ever comprehensive guide to understanding, starting, and managing university startups. By systematically describing the process of translating academic research into commercial enterprises, Don Rose and Cam Patterson give a thorough, process-oriented, and practical set of guidelines that cover not only best practices but also common--and avoidable--mistakes. They detail the key factors and components that contribute to a successful start-up, explain what makes university start-ups unique, delineate the steps of building and managing them, and describe how to foster and maintain start-ups at a university. Written for faculty and staff working on campus, tech-transfer officers, university administrators, and venture capitalists unfamiliar with university structures, Research to Revenue ensures that any reader unfamiliar with technology commercialization and entrepreneurship will understand the fundamentals of the process, including intellectual property rights, fund-raising, and business models. This work is an invaluable resource for the successful formation and well-managed operation of university start-ups.

A compelling account of how incorporating play into work can help us overcome the uncertainty and turbulence that surrounds work How can we learn to deal with uncertainty at work? The answer, as Dodgson and Gann eloquently portray in this pathfinding book, is to learn from the adaptive behaviors of entrepreneurs. Play, the authors show, is a crucial component of this. It encourages exploration, experimentation, and curiosity while it also challenges established practices and orthodoxies. It facilitates change in people and organizations.   Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and innovators, this book explains why we should incorporate play into work, what play looks like, and how to encourage playfulness in individuals and organizations. Dodgson and Gann identify four key behaviors that endorse, encourage, and guide play: grace, craft, fortitude, and ambition, and provide a blueprint for an alternative way of working that fosters resilience and encourages innovation and growth in difficult times.

In a world where entrepreneurial success often seems deceptively accessible, it is not always clear what makes a person entrepreneurial. In this book, Dimo Dimov offers a reflective insight into the entrepreneurial journey, striking up a conversation about entrepreneurship in order to challenge and untangle existing preconceptions. A discussion of challenges and tensions such as idea versus opportunity, genius versus lunatic, and skill versus luck forms the foundation of the book, while the second part offers actions and considerations which can help the reader to seek opportunities in a fractious environment. The final part of the text focuses on the collective spirit in entrepreneurship, arising from the interplay between participation and outcomes. The author brings a succinct diversity to the field, making this book essential reading for undergraduate and postgraduate students on entrepreneurship courses, as well as scholars, researchers, and practitioners looking for a new perspective on entrepreneurship.

Understanding the origins of new businesses -- the firm creation process--has been dramatically affected by the development of longitudinal studies of business start-ups. Several projects have been implemented to track the development of new firms, from the emergence of a business idea and organization of a start-up team through the birth of an operational business. The U.S. projects (the first and second Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics, known as PSED I and II) have counterparts in a number of other countries: Australia, Canada, China, Latvia, Netherlands (two projects), Norway, and Sweden. These eleven projects in nine countries, implemented over the past decade, are at different stages of development and have been utilized for a wide range of assessments of entrepreneurial and business creation phenomena. This volume presents the state of the art of these international research projects, providing the first in-depth comparison of the firm creation data across a wide range of national contexts. The work will be of great interest to the research community, particularly those developing such projects in their own countries, as well as policy makers and scholars interested in the effect of national context on the business creation process.

For 21st-century entrepreneurs, this book provides the practical guidance they need to overcome the often intimidating challenges of starting, organizing, and running a new business effectively and efficiently. * 400 unique evaluative descriptions of print and electronic resources for initial start-up, creating a business plan, management, marketing, personnel and HR, and competitive analysis * Screenshots of important and useful web pages * A glossary of relevant terms and acronyms * An index provides access by author, title, subject, and webpage