1ZEUB0 - Summary
Lecture 1: Introduction to technology entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to create
future goods and services (process of planning, organizing, operating and assuming the
risk of a new business).
What entrepreneurship entails of:
1. Understand where exactly is an opportunity
2. Understand what exact product/service responds to that opportunity and how to make a
commercially viable offering of it
3. Start doing it
4. Do even more of it (scale up)
An opportunity is being able to sell a product at a price that is higher than the cost of
making. An opportunity does not have to be very innovative (this is often assumed though).
➔ Opportunity = Idea + Action
Key issue is that entrepreneurship is fundamentally uncertain and by default we don’t know:
- What is the exact problem
- Who exactly has that problem
- How exactly to solve it
- How much is it worth if we do solve it
Opportunities tend to have a duration called the opportunity window.
Sources of entrepreneurial opportunities:
Changes in:
1. Technology
o New disruptive technology
o Moore’s law, Metcalf’s law
o New technologies affect current and future business opportunities. When a new
technology is created, new businesses form to take the technology to wider
audiences in society.
2. Market / economy
o Value chain disruption/vulnerability
o Large firms ignoring new relatively small customer groups
o Undervalued assets / markets
o For market, solve a problem with a twist: finding gaps in the marketplace with the
long tail phenomenon (e.g., even a very small market niche is big enough still to
provide an attractive opportunity)
o For economy, these forces affect consumers’ level of disposable income
3. Demographics (migration, male/female ratio etc.)
4. Social trends (changes in how we live, etc.)
o Vegetarianism
, o Change in social trends provide openings for new businesses on an ongoing basis (e.g.
family and work patterns, increasing focus on health care, new forms of entertainment)
5. Laws, (de-)regulation and standards
6. Politics (wars, elections, etc.)
o Laws that protect the environment
o Subsidies provided to renewable energy investments
Myths about entrepreneurs:
1. Entrepreneurs are born, not made
o Studies show that some people are just a little bit more genetically predisposed
o Environment, life experiences, and personal choice are important
o Most importantly, you can think of entrepreneurship as a set of techniques.
2. Entrepreneurs invent things
o An inventor creates a novel device, method etc.
oAn entrepreneur assembles ALL the resources needed bearing ability to
transform the invention into a viable business.
3. Entrepreneurship is only about money
o It can be a vehicle for social/environmental change
o Arguably it is the only sustainable vehicle for change in these areas
4. Entrepreneurs establish new companies
o Most entrepreneurial activity takes place inside already existing companies
o Being entrepreneurial is not a question of making new legal bodies,
it’s a question of mindset and a set of techniques.
Guest lecture
1. Find a partner
2. Learn to communicate (nonviolent communication (marshal B. Rosenberg))
3. Your first company is an experiment, just try it
4. Build your company on a good foundation (It doesn’t have to be crazy at work (book
recommendation))
5. You only know how risk feels once you take it
6. There are no short cuts, or only little, you have to go through all steps
7. Keep on learning
8. Involve your surrounding
9. Keep validating your business
10. Document your journey
Chapter 1
Sometimes an entrepreneur hits on a good idea from the start, but even so, most entrepreneurs have
gone through a thinking process to ascertain if they really have identified an opportunity before
making the jump.
➔ Key is to not only state why your idea or solution is good, but also to explain why it compares
favorably to alternative solutions on the basis of key criteria
,Starting points for new venture ideas typically fall into two broad categories:
- The demand-pull idea
o Responding to a customer need or problem, whereby the entrepreneur needs to
create a profitable, innovative solution to meet a need
o Often by experiencing this problem yourself or observation of experience
- The knowledge-push idea
o This involves a new technology or competence, the entrepreneur must seek a
profitable area of application and market
o Often by doing scientific research
Entrepreneurial opportunities don’t always fit neatly into one category.
Lecture 2: Developing entrepreneurial ideas and creativity methods
Entrepreneurs are individuals who discover, evaluate and exploit opportunities. Entrepreneurs seek to
generate value through the creation or expansion of economic activity. They discover opportunities
related to the information that they already possess.
Individuals with different prior knowledge will identify different
opportunities and their entrepreneurial efforts will be organized
differently.
Founding teams with a more diverse background identify more and
more varied market opportunities. Diversity in your team will really
help you to identify more opportunities, and giving you more
diverse options. The figure on the right side shows the role of
open mindset in exploiting opportunities.
Autonomy leads to better entrepreneurial team performance.
Random assignment of teams who then pick their own idea, is most
likely to succeed.
Stages in the entrepreneurial journey are:
- Idea creation and evaluation
- From idea to business proposition
- Proof of concept
- Marshalling resources
Why startups fail:
- No market need
- Ran out of cash
- Not the right team
- Get outcompeted
- Pricing / cost issue
- User unfriendly product
, Opportunities come from the ‘out there’ and ‘in here’.
1. The ‘out there’ is for the search and discovery phase where variation in
information is sought and external changes happen like:
o Technological changes
o Political and regulatory changes
o Social and demographic changes
2. Ideation from ‘in here’ is the create and transform phase where new
opportunities are created with knowledge from who you are/what you know and
from goals of stakeholders. This is an iterative process of committing stakeholders
and looking into knowledge and networks.
The macro-environment is a source of opportunity. Often the PEST(N) analysis is used. This
is the entire macro-environment existing of political/legal, economic, social/demographic,
technological and natural environments.
Identifying today’s (and tomorrow’s) problems
- Exploring the problem space
- Finding the ‘right’ problem
- How does it link to your solution?
- What fits with your (and your team’s) interest?
Megatrends are driving forces that define world today and of tomorrow. They are global,
sustained and macro-economic forces of development that impact business, economy,
society, cultures and personal lives, defining future world and increasing pace of change.
Megatrends are important because:
- They have different meanings and impacts for different industries
- Implications for companies’ future strategies, service and products
- Implications for entrepreneurs
o Megatrends can be used to identify relevant signals and drivers
o Megatrends can be used as a base for strategic decision making
o Megatrends can help to identify and focus on the ‘right’ problems
Within every individual, creativity is a function of three components:
- Expertise
o Knowledge – technical, procedural, and intellectual.
- Motivation
o An inner passion to solve the problem at hand leads to solutions far more creative
than do external rewards, such as money. Not all motivation is created equal.
- Creative-thinking skills
o Creative-thinking skills determine how flexibly and imaginatively people approach
problems.
o The skill itself depends on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works
Our ability to think creatively is partly genetic but develops mostly through learning:
