Startups is a popular phenomenon that has a significant impact on global economy growth, innovation and society development. However, there is still insufficient understanding about startups, ...particularly, how to start a new business in the relation to consequent performance. Toward this knowledge, we have performed an empirical study regarding the differences between a Resource and Competence View (Internal) vs Environment and Market View (External) when defining a Business. 701 entrepreneurs have reflected on their startups on nine classes of Resources (values, vision, personal objectives, employees and partners, buildings and rental contracts, cash and credit, patents, IPR's and brands, products and services and finally revenues and grants) and three elements of the Business Mission ("KeyContribution", "KeyMarket" and "Distinction"). It seems to be a tendency to favour the Internal View over the External View. This tendency is clearer in Stable Economies (Europe) than in Emerging Economies (South Africa). There seems to be a co-variation between the tendency to favour the Internal View and the tendency to focus on adding Resources. Finally, we found that an order-based analysis seems to explain the differences between the two views better than a number-based method.
Building an entrepreneurship data warehouse Dahle, Yngve; Duc, Anh Nguyen; Steinert, Martin ...
2017 International Conference on Engineering, Technology and Innovation (ICE/ITMC),
2017-June
Conference Proceeding
Open access
The main principle of the Lean Startup movement is that static business planning should be replaced by a dynamic development, where products, services, business model elements, business objectives ...and activities are frequently changed based on constant customer feedback. Our ambition is to empirically measure if such changes of the business idea, the business model elements, the project management and close interaction with customers really increases the success rate of entrepreneurs, and in what way. Our first paper; "Does Lean Startup really work? Foundation for an empirical study" presented the first attempt to model the relations we want to measure. This paper will focus on how to build and set up a test harness (from now on called the Entrepreneurship Platform or EP) to gather empirical data from Companies and how to store these data together with demographical and financial data from the PROFF-portal in the Entrepreneurial Data Warehouse (from now called the EDW). We will end the paper by discussing the potential methodological problems with our method, before we document a test run of our set-up to verify that we are actually able to populate the Data Warehouse with time series data.
Poduzetničke vještine su nužne svim diplomantima koji planiraju pokrenuti vlastito poduzeće. Dodatno, te vještine sve više traže i poslodavci, čak i od diplomanata tehničke izobrazbe. Ovaj rad ...uspoređuje dva ekstrakurikularna programa u koje su bili uključeni student četiri različita ne-ekonomska obrazovna profila iz Hrvatske i SAD. Tijekom istraživanja je identificirano nekoliko izazova. Priprema i izvršavanje poduzetničkog obrazovnog programa za studente s vrlo različitom razinom relevantnih predznanja je jedan od njih. Integracija nastavnih metoda iz učionice s 'distance learning' metodama i postizanje učinkovite ravnoteže pristupa 'biti edukativan' i 'biti zanimljiv i atraktivan' predstavljaju dodatne izazove. Spol sudionika edukativnih programa, prethodna izobrazba, poduzetničko iskustvo njihovih obitelji i neposredni planovi nakon diplomiranja su identificirani kao utjecajne varijable na njihovo zadovoljstvo programom.
In this paper we propose a fuzzy control model that can help to choose and filter the application for grants in business start-up programs run by public institutions. We think that using fuzzy logic ...has advantages over regular procedures since we move into a complex and vague stage of performance. Fuzzy control introduces expert knowledge in a very natural way, it uses linguistic variables and inference processes that are characteristic of ordinary language, which facilitates decision-making in complex situations. Our model considers on the one hand the business idea and on the other the person as entrepreneur. Indicators and criteria that experts consider relevant to the evaluation of the grant are modeled as linguistic variables and treated as antecedent and consequent of a fuzzy inference engine, whose output provides the final assessment of the application. At the end of our paper we solve a simple case study to clarify the procedure.
The establishment of an Agribusiness Innovation Center (AIC) in Senegal takes advantage of already existing agriculture and agro-processing sectors and uses this to both identify and support a ...pipeline of growth enterprises that can be accelerated. The AIC initiative seeks to identify growth entrepreneurs and these are defined as entrepreneurs that can create a significant number of job opportunities while expanding markets through regional, national and export sales. Their impact is therefore much deeper than survivalist entrepreneurs who are in business to support their immediate family livelihood. Once identified, the AIC supports them to make best use of resources and market opportunities. In a phased approach, starting with the Saint Louis region, the AIC is introducing pre-incubation support that can, depending on the initial outcomes, develop into a future AIC hub being developed in each of the regions. The Saint Louis Satellite AIC (sAIC) includes the following activities: 1) establishment and awareness creation; 2) introductory entrepreneurship workshops; 3) pre-incubation enterprise development programme; 4) assessment of regional business opportunities in the region and market opportunity matching with local enterprises; and 5) initiation of incubation for selected enterprises.
Overview and Commentary Reynolds, Paul D.; Curtin, Richard T.
New Business Creation,
2011
Book Chapter
Business creation is a widespread and basic feature of all market economies. Contributions to job creation, new goods and services, a broader range of work opportunities, enhanced productivity, and ...economic growth benefit all nations and their citizens. The scope, importance, and contributions of business creation suggest there is considerable merit in understanding the major factors affecting the occurrence and outcomes of entrepreneurial activity. There is no question that personal, environmental, cultural, contextual, and institutional factors have an impact on major aspects of the business creation process. The challenge is in determining which factors have what types of impact at each stage of the business life course.
The saga of Phorm’s Webwise behavioural targeting system, has been fraught with problems: legal challenges, technical disputes, serial campaigning, police action, EU action, smear campaigns and ...propaganda. Until the spring of 2009 it had looked as though Phorm would succeed, with the UK government firmly behind it, three of the biggest ISP’s planning to use its service, an endorsement of sorts from noted privacy advocates and guarded approval from the Information Commissioner’s Office. Then, however, things began to fall apart, and by the autumn of 2009 Phorm’s business model was in tatters. Why did this happen, and what lessons need to be learned? This chapter looks at the Phorm saga through the lens of Symbiotic Regulation, and suggests that Phorm’s apparent failure has been a result of their failure to understand the complexity of the regulatory matrix. In particular, Phorm underestimated the views of user-groups and digital rights advocates – and the influence and effect those views could have. The saga has many losers – as well as Phorm itself, the UK government and the ISPs all come out the worse for wear. This chapter suggests how much of this could have been avoided.
Tallinn School of Economics and Business Administration (TSEBA) at Tallinn University of Technology (TUT) is one of the most important institutions of higher education in economics and business ...administration in Estonia. TSEBA offers study programmers at Bachelor, Master’s and Doctoral level. Most of the economics courses to students in technical specialties at Tallinn University of Technology are provided by TSEBA. Programmes of the technical specialties at Tallinn University of Technology include two economic subjects such as (1) macro- and microeconomics and (2) business administration or entrepreneurship and business planning. The programme for students in technical specialties, as a rule on master’s degree level, contains entrepreneurship and business planning as a compulsory subject. The objective is to improve students’ knowledge about entrepreneurship, their skills for setting up a new business and to promote their entrepreneurial behaviour. Every year nearly 300 students take this course.
The benefits of business planning and our abilities to teach it have recently been questioned from both practical and theoretical perspectives. Carrier (2005), claims that instead of conducting the ...traditional business planning, we should be more creative and, in teaching, too, focus more on inventing and developing business ideas. Hindle (1997) also criticises the standardised form of business planning and demands more flexibility and creativity instead of rigidity. The benefits of planning might actually rather be a myth than a fact, since planning does not necessarily improve performance. Tomas Karlsson (2005) argues that there is actually only a tenuous relationship between planning and performance. He also suggests that there is no evidence that the performance of a start-up business will improve or have more potential if the entrepreneur has made a business plan. The situation may even be the opposite, as Carter, Gartner and Reinold’s (1996) study indicated. Those having a business plan in their early start-up phase tended to stay in the intention phase longer than others. Thus, instead of helping to start the business, business planning seems rather to cause more or less delay in this process. Delmar and Shane (2004) also discovered that there was no significant relationship between the writing of a business plan and subsequent profitability. Regardless of these problems, recent Western reports indicate that the most popular approach to teaching entrepreneurship in universities is business planning (Menzies 2005).
The Latvian Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (LV-PSED) is designed to gain an understanding of the factors leading to successful business creation as well as of those factors leading to the ...failure of the start-up. The focus on the causes of success and failure distinguishes LV-PSED from most other surveys of businesses in Latvia which have focussed on barriers confronted by existing firms. Very little is known about business start-up efforts in Latvia, as well as their outcomes in terms of new firm creation or disengagement.
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