Entrepreneurship

Full course description

Not many will contest the societal impact of enterprising individuals and entrepreneurial ventures on our economies. Entrepreneurs may start-up companies that challenge (and often replace) incumbents. In the process, they create new jobs and apply competitive pressure on established firms. Entrepreneurs supposedly have an important direct and indirect effect on driving innovation. Despite the heroic image of successful entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship is much more about failure than about success. What motivates entrepreneurial types to venture of on a path that (at least statistically) will result in failure? Are they naïve, or are they stupid. In this course you will study factors that drive entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial process. We will focus on new venture gestation: the initial stages of the process that may result in a new company to emerge. Throughout the course you will explore how entrepreneurs not only rely on generic business management principles, but also how they cope with the uncertainty, risk, scarcity of time, capital and other resources that is inherent to all entrepreneurial venturing. Perhaps you will conclude that many entrepreneurs are in fact not really good managers (good entrepreneurs will compensate for this by hiring better managers). We start the course by explore the process dynamics of entrepreneurial activity. We then will explore the origins of entrepreneurial opportunity, review how entrepreneurs screen and develop the opportunities that they discover, and you will unravel how entrepreneurs seek to appropriate the returns from their enterprising behaviour. This is not a “how-to” course, instead the course will introduce you to relevant scholarly insights that provide (future) entrepreneurs, an evidence base for entrepreneurial action. Those students that are ready to enact entrepreneurship may want to register for the LaunchBase Pre-incubation programme that we provide to enterprising students and alumni.