(BUS511) The Entrepreneurial Process Assignment Answers

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is a way of thinking, reasoning, and acting that is opportunity obsessed, holistic in approach, and leadership balanced for the purpose of value creation and capture. At the heart of the process is the creation and/or recognition of opportunities, and a willingness to take risks, but in a very calculated fashion. Entrepreneurship can occur—or fail to occur—in firms that are old and new, small and large. It involves continued renewal, as entrepreneurs are never satisfied with the nature of their opportunity.

The upstart companies of the 1970s and 1980s have had a profound impact on the competitive structure of the U.S. and the world. Giant firms, once thought invincible, have been dismembered by the new wave of entrepreneurial ventures. Between 2003 and 2005, employment at venture-backed companies grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent compared to just 1.3 percent for the U.S. economy as a whole. Business autopsies show that large firms were slow in recognizing the changing environment.

Because of its highly dynamic, fluid, ambiguous, and chaotic character, entrepreneurship’s constant changes frequently pose paradoxes:

1. An opportunity with no or very low potential can be an enormously big opportunity.
2. To make money you must first lose money.
3. To create and build wealth one must relinquish wealth.
4. To succeed, one must first experience failure.
5. Entrepreneurship requires considerable thought, preparation, and planning, yet is basically an unplannable event.
6. For creativity and innovativeness to prosper, rigor and discipline must accompany the process.
7. Entrepreneurship requires a bias toward action and a sense of urgency, but also demands patience and perseverance.
8. The greater the organization, orderliness, discipline, and control, the less you will control your ultimate destiny.
9. Adhering to management’s best practice became a seed of self-destruction and loss of leadership to upstart competitors.
10. To realize long-term equity value, you must forgo the temptations of short-term profitability.
11. To thrive, one needs to be adept at coping with ambiguity, chaos, and uncertainty, and at building management skills.

One of the big differences between the growth-minded entrepreneur and the traditional small business owner is that the entrepreneur thinks bigger. Patricia Cloherty, a venture capitalist, believes that if you start a business, you might as well start a big business. This lesson will help determine whether the idea you are chasing is a winner or a loser.

The journey from idea to high potential opportunity is illusive, contradictory, and perilous. This journey can be viewed as a road trip through varied terrain and weather conditions. This lesson focuses a zoom lens on the opportunity. It shares the road maps and benchmarks used by successful entrepreneurs and other equity investors. It will examine the role of ideas and pattern recognition in the creative process of entrepreneurship.

Only about 5 percent of entrepreneurs create ventures that emerge from the pack. These ventures reveal a highly dynamic, constantly molding, shaping, and changing work of art. The emphasis here is on the need to determine fit and balancing risk and reward.

Lesson Learning Objectives

By the conclusion of this lesson you should be able to:

• Articulate a definition of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial process – from lifestyle ventures to high potential enterprises.
• Explain how entrepreneurs and their financial backers get the odds for success in their favor, by defying the familiar pattern of disappointment and failure.
• Apprise the Timmons Model of the entrepreneurial process; describe how it can be applied to your entrepreneurial career aspirations and ideas for businesses, and how recent research confirms its validity.
• Compare the pressures and demands in the marketplace that are driving opportunities for entrepreneurs with an eye toward sustainability.
• Gain competitive advantage by orienting products and processes that take environmental issues into account.
• Identify sources of information for finding and screening venture opportunities.

Reading

Study Chapters 3, 4, and 5 of the text.

View the Power Points for Chapters 3, 4, and 5.

Web Resources

Chapter 3

www.inc.com/inc5000/ - Inc.5000 Magazine has increased its database to include 5,000 private businesses. As in previous years, the top 500 fastest growing firms are ranked.

www.sba.gov/advo/research - The Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) is an independent voice for small business within the federal government. This site is a useful resource for small business research and statistics on a wide range of topics.

www.ypo.org/ - More than 11,000 young global leaders in 90 nations rely on one exclusive peer network that connects them to exchange ideas, pursue learning, and share strategies to achieve personal and professional growth and success.

Chapter 4

www.cleanedge.com - Clean Edge is a leading research and publishing firm helping companies, investors, and governments understand and profit from clean technologies.

www.cleantech.com- The Cleantech NetworkTM founded Cleantech as a viable investment category in 2002 and has played an influential role in the development of this fast growth investment category. The network brings capital and innovation together through Cleantech Forums® and membership services.

www.environmentalhealthnews.org- Environmental Health Sciences is a not-for-profit organization founded in 2002 to help increase public understanding of emerging scientific links between.

www.greenbiz.com - GreenBiz is a free information resource on how to align environmental responsibility with business success. It includes news and resources for large and small businesses through a combination of Web sites, workshops, daily news feeds, electronic newsletters, and briefing papers.

www.sustainablebusiness.com - Sustainable Business provides global news and networking services to help green business grow, covering all sectors: renewable energy, green building, sustainable investing, and organics.

Chapter 5

http://enterpriseforum.mit.edu/ - The MIT Enterprise Forum, Inc. builds connections to technology entrepreneurs and to the communities in which they reside.

www.ideafinder.com This unique site celebrates innovative products and services. Includes History, Facts & Myths, Idea Showcase, and Future Ideas that may stimulate ideas for your own business. www.score.org – SCORE, or the SCORE Association, was previously known as the Service Corps of Retired Executives. SCORE is a nonprofit association dedicated to helping small businesses get off the ground, grow and achieve their goals through education and mentorship.

Assignments

The following Assignments should be completed and submitted to the course faculty via the learning platform for evaluation and grading. Submit your responses to these questions in one WORD document. List the question first, and then your response.

Your response must adequately cover the question without being wordy or relying on “yes” or “no” responses.

Short Answer Questions

1. What is meant by classic entrepreneurship, and the high potential venture? Why and how are threshold concepts (cover your equity, bootstrapping of resources, fit, and balance) important?
2. “People don’t want to be managed, they want to be led.” Explain what this means and its importance and implications for developing your own style and leadership philosophy.
3. What are the most important determinants of success and failure in new businesses? Who has the best and worst chances for success, and why?
4. What criteria and characteristics do high growth entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and private investors seek in evaluating business opportunities? How can these make a difference?
5. Define and explain the Timmons Model. Apply it and graphically depict, as in the Google example, the first five years or so of a new company with which you are familiar.
6. In what ways does looking through a sustainability lens change how an entrepreneur approaches a new venture opportunity?
7. Why has the clean commerce domain become one of the hottest for venture capital investors?
8. How has the communications revolution become a major driver of entrepreneurial thinking and opportunities in sustainable, green business models?
9. What are the most important skills, values, talents, abilities, and mind-sets one needs to cultivate as an entrepreneur?

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