Entrepreneurship

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In this course you will be introduced to some of the key insights on entrepreneurship that academics in the social sciences have produced. You will search the literature to unravel what drives 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. You will learn that entrepreneurship is quite distinctive from "management." It is also a phenomenon that is studied by many disciplines. Sociologist, psychologists, anthropologists (working inside and outside business schools) have studied entrepreneurship, and their findings provide an important intellectual foundation to this course (and to entrepreneurial practise). Perhaps surprisingly, in most economic theory the entrepreneur is neglected. However, several economists have pointed to the increasingly important role of entrepreneurs in modern economies. You should really regard as an introduction to what we know about entrepreneurship. It is not a course in which you prepare the start of a new venture. Nevertheless, you may expect the course to inspire you to start exploring opportunities that could pursue next to, or after your studies.