What is Entrepreneurship? - Video 1 - MODULE 1

What is Entrepreneurship?

SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0_gNb8YbvI

What is entrepreneurship? It certainly makes sense to start a course such as ours by really defining the term and understanding what it is and what it isn't.

Classical definitions of entrepreneurship are geared towards elements of creation. There's something new that's being built. It may be an enterprise or a business. An enterprise might include a nonprofit, or another type of organization, where a business is the company.

And they have a chance of profit or success. Profit we understand in the context of business. Success we understand the context of nonprofits, or other entities, or business that have goals beyond profit.

So why study it? Isn't something that you simply learn by doing? Or what are the motivations that people have for studying entrepreneurship? Well one motivation that we often hear from students is that of financial, and money and that's fine. That's a fine motivation. I would say that there's also the other side of the coin of likelihood or potential for that monetary success that is lower in startups than in many other careers. But, again if that's one of your ambitions, that's certainly fine. What we also see from students is an element of independence. With entrepreneurship, they want to do something different than what might be out there. They might want to make their own choice and pursue industries and markets and customers, In solutions that are personally interesting to them. And they see entrepreneurship as a path to achieve that.

Tied to that is an element of freedom. Now, with freedom it doesn't necessarily mean that you wake up late, you go to bed early, And that entrepreneurship is easy.

What it does mean is that you have the flexibility and the choice to do what you would like to do. Now when you are also working with investors, when you're working with partners, when you're working with customers, 

you do have a different type of boss in a different format in a different flavor. But it's not the type of traditional boss that many individuals may have. So when added all up freedom is certainly a motive for entrepreneurship and pursuing entrepreneurship. There's an element of creation, of wanting to build a business, of wanting to build products and build solutions that we see an attractant for entrepreneurship. There's an element of helping. There's an element of social entrepreneurship that we'll talk about, where you're building a business or you're building solutions, but they may be combating poverty. They may be combating homelessness. They may be trying to improve education, or healthcare, or other societal interest that you're trying to achieve with your new venture.

So why not entrepreneurship? If there's this thing that you can make money, you can create, you can help, you can have freedom and independence. Why isn't everyone doing it? Why in the U.S for example, are less than 4% of the adult population entrepreneurs?  Well, there is risk.

There's risk of time. There's risk of money. There is elements tied to failure. You are likely to fail. Based on most research, there is peer pressure. It may not be the most popular thing among your friends or your family. They may see the risk as not worth taking, and that's an added challenge for entrepreneurs. There's an opportunity cost of to take a job somewhere else. Of to use your time to generate a more reliable stream of salary and income by other pursuits.

So what does it take? We've talked about some of the benefits. We've talked about some of the challenges. What does it take to succeed in entrepreneurship? And this is probably the heart of our course. What we'll going to be looking at is opportunity discovery. How do you identify a greateidea? How do you validate an idea that you may already have, as something that has some true entrepreneurial potential. So there's that level of analysis that we'll talk about, or really understanding what's it take to really  understand and demystify entrepreneurship. And dig in and find great opportunities.

We'll talk about decision making. And before we talk about business, we'll talk about the entrepreneur themselves.

And so, in summary, by first understanding our motives and understanding our goals for the study of entrepreneurship we have a solid foundation. It gives us this foundation for understanding opportunity discovery, opportunity analysis and entrepreneurial decision-making and these are going to be some of the key things that we will explore next within our course.