Introduction

Question 1

What is the definition of entrepreneurship?

Answer 1

One who creates a new business in the face of risk and uncertainty for the purpose of achieving profit and growth by identifying opportunities and assembling the necessary resources to capitalize

Question 2

What are some entrepreneur traits?

Answer 2

• Identifying opportunites
  
  • spot trends as they arise.
  • i.e find problem, provide a solution and charge money for it (commercialisation)
• Achieving profit and growth
  
  • high achievers, with achievement measured by profit and growth
• Risk and Uncertainty
  
  • can you tolerate ‘ambiguity’
• Creativity
  
  • can you enhance your creativity
• Assembling the necessary resources
  
  • what resources are required

Question 3

What are the steps to entrepreneurship?

Answer 3

• Identify other people’s needs
• Build a product that meets those needs
• You get it wrong
• You repeat until you get it right (falling multiple times)
• Take advantage of luck

Question 4

What are the types of entrepreneur?

Answer 4

1. Opportunity-driven entrepreneurs
2. Necessity-driven entrepreneurs
3. Business Entrepreneurs
4. Social entrepreneurs

Question 5

What are the features of an opportunity-driven entrepreneurs?

Answer 5

• Achievement, opportunity and money
• Strong desire to be independent
• Bored with the same work every day
• Want to be their own bosses
• Specific mindset

Question 6

What are the features of an necessity-driven entrepreneurs?

Answer 6

• make business because they don’t have jobs in order to make money
• Coming out of some kind of adversity
• Made redundant
• Lost pension/savings in Global Financial Crisis (2007) or COVID 19
• No better/other choice than to become a entrepreneur

Question 7

What are features of business entrepreneurs?

Answer 7

They are driven by a profit motive - constantly innovating for market share

Question 8

What are features of social entrepreneurs?

Answer 8

• driven by a mission to fill gaps left by the market and public sector
• can be profitable as well
• can lead to a creation of a new, unique business model (e.g earn talk/internet time, micro-financing)

Question 9

What are the risks of entrepreneurship?

Answer 9

• Financial risk
  
  • usually an entrepreneur puts a significant portion of their savings or other resources at stake
• Career risk
  
  • will entrepreneur be able to find a job or go back to their old jobs if their venture should fail
• Family and social risk:
  
  • Families exposed to the risk of an incomplete family experience and the possibility of permanent emotional scars
• Psychic risk
  
  • The well being of the entrepreneur is perhaps the greatest risk

Question 10

What is innovation?

Answer 10

Innovation is not ‘invention’. Coming up with good ideas is only part of the equation. The rest is market, technical and commercial success

Question 11

What are some examples of well known innovations?

Answer 11

1. Facebook
2. Napster
3. iTunes, iPhone and iPad
4. Cloud computing
5. Amazon recommendations, Amazon shipping
6. Electricity
7. Television

Question 12

Why does innovation matters?

Answer 12

Higher risk, market transforming innovations lead to far higher returns than safer, incremental changes

Question 13

Why does new products fail?

Answer 13

1. The company can’t support fast growth
2. The product falls short of claims and gets bashed
3. The new item exists in “product limbo”
4. The product defines a new category and requires substantial consumer education - but doesn’t get it
5. The product is revolutionary, but there’s no market for it
6. Lack of organisation capacity or expertise
7. No discernible benefits over competition
8. Inferior product
9. Inadequate distribution
10. Overestimation of market size
11. Incorrect sales process
12. Poor positioning/promotion
13. Price too high or too low
14. Poor fit between product/service design and customer needs

Question 14

What are the basic theories of innovation?

Answer 14

1. Product innovation
   - changes in the things (products/services which and an organisation offers
2. Process innovation
   - changes in the ways they are created and delivered
3. Position innovation
   - changes in the context in which they are introduced
4. Paradigm innovation
   - changes in the underlying mental and business models which frame what the organisation does

Question 15

What are the external factors that affect innovation?

Answer 15

• New technology emergence
• New political rules (free-trade, carbon tax, socialism to capitalism, new government, de-regulation)
• Change in market preferences/behaviour (traditional music industry vs download)
• Systemic change (Mass production)
  
  • solution to people wanting customized goods but wanted cheap products
  • Mass production allows for standardised cheap product that can be customizable because of when they made it in the process
  • Example: Dell
    
    • components made but assembly was customized
• Unthinkable events such as 9/11, Japan and nuclear power, COVID

Question 16

How to manage innovation?

Answer 16

• A large part of the innovation process is ‘management’
• Entrepreneurs need managers (or partners with business acumen) and vice versa
• Organisations too need to foster cultures that allow creative independence as well as ensuring ‘control’ (to some extent)
• 50% of founding CEOs are no longer in that role after 3 years (Wasserman 2008)

Question 17

How to measure innovation?

Answer 17

• Input measures of innovation measure the resources that are applied
• Innovation process intensity\ measure the quantity and quality of innovation activities, in a sense measuring the breadth and thickness of the pipeline of innovation activities
• Innovation outputs can be in terms of direct outputs, such as patents, new products and services developed, or the ultimate business outcomes of these, such as the sales and profits from new offerings or the costs reduced by process innovations