Engaging and scholarly without being dry and demystifying the startup process, this is a must read for the manager/. Professor Richard Harrison, Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Edinburgh Business School, Edinburgh, UK. Brännback and Carsrud present an engaging and comprehensive approach to starting and growing businesses that covers the context, mindset, and type of behaviors needed to be an entrepreneur.
Brännback and Carsrud have put together a very practical book that is perfect for college students, aspiring entrepreneurs, or "anyone who wants to chase an opportunity and achieve a goal." This is a book for real people who create real companies and real careers that achieve their goals, not mythical ones. Reading this book was a valuable refresher for my MBA courses and a reminder of some of my many mistakes. Editor: Cenveo® Publisher Services Proofreader: Cenveo Publisher Services Indexer: Cenveo Publisher Services Manufacturing Purchaser: Dan Uhrig.
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The Why
We hope that in this book we can bring the reader closer to the excitement of starting a new venture, the joy of your first sale, the challenge of recruiting staff, the pains of growth, the fear of failure, the agony of planning, and the ultimate satisfaction of seeing what you have created as an entrepreneur. Remember, one of the joys of being an entrepreneur is that sometimes you not only get to challenge the rules, but sometimes you have the opportunity to break them. If no one ever tried to follow the rules, the rules would never change and that is the evolutionary process.
One of the important reasons we are able to create this book is all the entrepreneurs and business owners we have worked with over the years. Much of the research that underlies this book is not only our own, but also the work of hundreds of our colleagues who have built the academic foundation of this field since we first entered it over 30 years ago since. Without their research and insight, this book would be just a collection of old wives' tales.
To keep this book from being a boring academic book, we have decided not to cite every piece of research work that is meaningful (and useful) in the field. In fact, this book is being completed during the 2015 BCERC meeting in Boston.
The What
Using a mini-case and several short vignettes, we explore the different meanings of both success and failure in a new venture. We try to make it clear that failure does not mean the end of becoming an entrepreneur, but it is only part of the learning process of creating a new venture. We discuss how to find a good idea and how to take advantage of an opportunity to create a new venture.
We then turn our attention to why every business owner needs legal and accounting advice during the new business formation process to ensure appropriate tax treatment. Then, in Chapter 8, we'll dive into the fundamental area of growing your new venture and managing that growth. We spend some time discussing the myth of high-growth companies and why profitability is the primary financial goal for any new venture if success is a goal.
We discuss when you plan in the process of creating a new business and what should be included in those plans or parts of plans. In this final chapter, we go through the planning process in some detail with examples and how to view plans as a road map through the uncertainty of starting a new business.
The Who
Introduction
Pick up any newspaper or business publication anywhere in the world today, such as the Financial Times, New York Times, Singapore's Straits Times, Sydney Morning Herald or the Economist, and you'll probably find an article where a politician or an economist argues the importance of entrepreneurship is for the nation and that we need more entrepreneurs to ensure economic growth and prosperity. Most of us will ignore the pontifications of the economist or politician and turn our attention to those riveting stories about the brave entrepreneurs and their uphill battle to build successful ventures. These are also the stories that are often seen as documentaries on TV and even award-winning films (for example, The Social Network in 2010 about Facebook or Jobs in 2013 about the founder of Apple).
We have a myth in our heads of what the prototypical startup founder is, and that myth is an early- to mid-20s white male who studied computer science at an elite school and dropped out.
The Entrepreneur
Quite often it is a story of a successful entrepreneur who has risen from rags to riches through hard work and an ability to make the right decisions at the right time. For example, Hollywood has found good film scripts in the entrepreneurial stories of the lives of Henry Ford and Thomas Alva Edison. Yet Hollywood has yet to tell the stories of some famous female entrepreneurs like Madam C.
Walker who turned her homemade recipes for hair and scalp care products into a business empire that made her the United States' first self-made black female millionaire in the early 1900s. The alternative story type is the story of a local or national entrepreneur celebrating a half-century in business and now passing the firm on to the next generation. You will most likely read these two types of stories because they are spectacular and entertaining.
Ask yourself if reading any of these stories or watching these movies made you dream of being an entrepreneur. You also don't have to be under 60 or independently wealthy to be the entrepreneur we demonstrate in this book.
Entrepreneurial Dreams and Their Outcomes
What Is This Thing Called Entrepreneurship?
- There Is No One Narrative
- Collective Dreams
- Why Entrepreneurship Became Important
- Challenging Assumptions—Entrepreneurship Is for All
- Entrepreneurial Environments
- National Innovation Systems for Entrepreneurs
- Incubators and Accelerators
- Entrepreneurs: Made or Born
- Who Is an Entrepreneur?
- The Entrepreneurial Personality
- Entrepreneurial Mindset
- Defining Entrepreneurship: It All Depends
- Opportunity Recognition
- Entrepreneurial Goals
- Different Goals for Different Folks
- Other Definitional Issues
- The Self-Employed as Entrepreneurs
- The Context for Self-Employed Entrepreneurs
- A False Dichotomy
- Do Goals Differentiate?
- A Mini-Case Example
- Opportunity and the Entrepreneur
- Exercises
- Advanced Exercises
Success is very much in the eye of the beholder and depends on the goals the entrepreneur has set for themselves. Regardless, Hoselitz (1951) finds early traces in historical dictionaries up to the Middle Ages in the normal course of the development of the French language. The word entrepreneur has been used so widely in the United States and in Europe in recent years that you often wonder who is not included.
While there is some evidence to support that men are more entrepreneurs than women, that statistic is rapidly changing in the United States and worldwide. As we show in the following text, creating personal wealth is not always what drives an entrepreneur. Some consider Salk an early social entrepreneur long before the term appeared in the media.
This may explain why immigrants in the United States have higher rates of new business creation. In the late 1980s, academics tried to define who is an entrepreneur and what is entrepreneurial. Research has found differences in the cognitive styles of entrepreneurs and that successful entrepreneurs have different entrepreneurial leadership styles.
Furthermore, that a person must be an entrepreneur does not mean that the person must start a for-profit business as shown in the previous example with Dr. It has also become a source of concern when it appears to be in slow decline as in the US since 2008. Again, there is still little agreement in the field on how to study how opportunities are created or exploited.
It is possible that failure is driven by many of the same factors as success. The same can be said for musicians and performers who have embraced new technologies in creating their art form. In Austin alone, for example, one of the fastest growing areas for self-employment is the arts, entertainment and recreation sector.
The entrepreneur is mainly characterized by innovative behavior and will use strategic management practices in business. He had a clear goal: to create a sustainable classical music group in the South Florida market.
J. Heinz, 5
