Disciplined entrepreneurship pdf disciplined entrepreneurship pdf free download

While the entrepreneur as a lone hero is a common narrative, a close reading of the research tells a different story. Teams start companies. Importantly, a bigger team actually adds to the odds of success. In fact, while charisma may be effective for a short period, it is difficult to sustain. Instead, research shows that more important than being charismatic, entrepreneurs need to be effective communicators, recruiters, and salespeople.

The third myth is that there is an entrepreneurship gene, that certain people are genetically predisposed for success in starting companies. As the cartoon at the beginning of this chapter suggests, such a physical gene has not and will not be found. Some believe personality traits like flamboyance or boldness are correlated with successful entrepreneurship, but that line of thought is misguided.

Instead, there are real skills that increase the odds of success, such as people management, sales skills, and the topic of this book, product conception and delivery. These skills can be taught.

They are not genetically gifted to a few lucky souls. People can adapt and learn new behaviors, and entrepreneurship therefore can be broken down into discrete behaviors and processes that can be taught.

For evidence, we need look no further than the one magical square mile that is MIT. Students who attend MIT start companies at an absolutely prolific rate. In fact, as of , over 25, existed, and new ones are started each year. To put that in perspective, the total annual revenue from MIT alumni—founded companies taken together would make them the eleventh-largest economy in the world. Why is MIT so successful at turning out entrepreneurs? The first response people often have is that the students at MIT are extremely intelligent.

The second response is that this success comes about because MIT students have access to leading- edge technologies in the laboratories, and thus it is easy for them to start companies. Again, this is a measurable hypothesis. Because of the outstanding Technology Licensing Office TLO at MIT, there are numbers on how many companies are started each year with technology out of the labs because they have to be licensed through this office.

This number is 20 to 30 companies per year, which is very impressive when compared to the stats at other universities. Yet this number seems small when we consider that MIT alumni as a whole start companies per year.

The real reason why MIT is so successful at creating new companies is a combination of spirit and skills. Role models are everywhere, and they are not abstract icons, but rather very real people no different from you.

Students are galvanized by the atmosphere of ambition and collaboration. The work of developing entrepreneurial skills comes from classes, competitions, extracurricular events, and networking programs, and the teachings available both in the classroom and outside are extremely relevant and immediately valuable to the students so that in this environment they attack the subjects with a greater level of interest and commitment.

This is also amplified because every student in the class is fully engaged. A class taught in such an engaging environment is far more productive for students and instructors. A major contributor to this virtuous cycle is the social herding mentality. As the students are learning and working on entrepreneurship, they are also collaborating with fellow students. They talk about their work when they are in social situations, and they naturally start to push one another with subtle or not-so-subtle competitiveness.

Not only do they learn from one another, but that learning becomes part of their individual and group identity. It is a positive feedback loop see Figure I.

Figure I. Distinguishing Two Distinct Types of Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurship is about creating a new business where one did not exist before. That definition seemed clear until my colleagues Professors Fiona Murray and Scott Stern and I spent a good deal of time talking to various organizations about how to promote entrepreneurship in different regions of the world. It is most often closely held, likely a family business, where close control of a small business is important.

These businesses generally do not need to raise as much money, so when money is injected into these businesses, the resultant increase in revenue and jobs created is relatively rapid. The key distinguishing factor is their focus on local markets. IDE entrepreneurs are aspiring to serve markets that go well beyond the local market. They are looking to sell their offering at a global or at least at a regional level.

These entrepreneurs usually work in teams where they build their business off some technology, process, business model, or other innovation that will give them a significant competitive advantage as compared to existing companies.

They are interested in creating wealth more than they are interested in control, and they often have to sell equity in their company to support their ambitious growth plans. While they are often slower to start, IDE entrepreneurs tend to have more impressive exponential growth when they do get customer traction See Table I. Growth is what they seek, at the risk of losing control of their company and having multiple owners.

Table I. Innovation is not necessary to SME establishment and growth, The company is based on some sort of innovation tech, business nor is competitive advantage. Most often family businesses or businesses with very little More diverse ownership base including a wide array of external external capital. The company typically grows at a linear rate. When you put The company starts by losing money, but if successful will have money into the company, the system revenue, cash flow, jobs, exponential growth.

Requires investment. When you put money into etc. These companies are much less likely to be geographically diverse and instead are concentrated around clusters of innovation. It is also generally the case that any injection of investment or money requires a much longer time to show results in terms of new revenues or jobs.

In the short run, the SME model will be more responsive; but with patience, the IDE ventures have the capacity to produce profound results as we have seen with companies like Apple, Google, Hewlett-Packard, and other publicly traded companies. Our Focus Is Innovation-Driven Enterprise A healthy economy consists of both types of entrepreneurship and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

Neither is better than the other. But they are substantively different enough that they require different mindsets and different sets of skills to be successful. What Is Innovation? The invention an idea, a technology, or some sort of intellectual property is important, but the entrepreneur does not need to create the invention.

In fact, the inventions that lead to innovation- driven companies often come from elsewhere. Likewise at Google, which has made most of its money through AdWords, the text-based, keyword-driven advertisements on their search results pages.

These examples show that the capability to commercialize an invention is necessary for real innovation. An entrepreneur, then, serves primarily as the commercialization agent. Innovation can come in many varieties including technology, process, business model, positioning, and more.

Some of the most exciting innovations of our time, such as Google, iTunes, Salesforce. They are enabled by technology, yes—Zipcar would find it difficult to maintain its large network of cars without keyless- entry technology for its members. There will still be many opportunities for technology-driven innovation in areas like energy storage, power electronics, wireless communications, and much more, but this is not the sole definition of innovation.

Roberts and Charles E. Six Themes of the 24 Steps The 24 Steps are discrete and can be grouped into six themes. Each step should be done in numerical order with the understanding that in each step, you will learn things that will prompt you to revise the work you have done in earlier steps. These themes present a general outline of how the 24 Steps will help you create a sustainable, innovation-based business. Some students have worked in one industry for years and want a change.

Some want to push their skills to the maximum and have the biggest impact on the world. Some want to be their own boss. Some hold patents and are interested in the different ways they can commercialize them.

Some have an idea about how their own life could be improved and they wonder if that idea is interesting to others. All of these reasons can be synthesized into three distinct categories see Table 0. You should be able to sum up your idea, technology, or interest in one succinct sentence.

How prototype most any technological empower them with jobs. I co-founded a company, own boss. The person may want to consider a hardware-based business, as it would line up well with the comparative advantage. Have a Technology: You have come up with a technological breakthrough and want to capitalize on it, or simply expedite its deployment to have a positive effect on society. Or, you have learned about a technological breakthrough and you see great potential for a business.

Have a Passion: You are confident and you are comfortable pushing yourself to develop your skills in the most comprehensive way possible. You also might believe that being an entrepreneur is the way to have the biggest impact on the world. Read on to learn how to find a good idea or technology based on your passion. But that approach can be discouraging to someone who is unfamiliar with entrepreneurship. In time, they will find a customer with a pain, or opportunity, where the customer is willing to pay for a solution.

No matter how you have become interested in entrepreneurship, you need to start by first answering the following question: What can I do well that I would love to do for an extended period of time? Once you have answered this question, you will have taken the first step toward discovering a customer pain—a pain that you are interested in alleviating because it is in line with what you are interested in and have expertise in.

By first taking stock of your personal interests, strengths, and skills, you can more readily identify good opportunities. You can do this exercise either alone or with a group of potential co-founders. Consider the following: Knowledge: What was the focus of your education or career? Capability: What are you most proficient at? Connections: Who do you know that has expertise in different industries?

Do you know other entrepreneurs? Name recognition: What are you or your partners well-known for? Skills in engineering? Understanding fiber optics? Passion for a particular market: Does the idea of improving healthcare excite you? How about education? Commitment: Do you have the time and effort to devote to this endeavor? Are you ready to make a new venture your primary or only focus?

If you or your founding group have strong coding and project management skills, you may be more inclined to develop a web app. If you are a pro at rapid prototyping, you may want to consider creating a physical product of some sort.

Or if your past work experience is in education or medicine, you may want to consider what you can create that would improve those areas. Often, you will find an idea or technology that improves something for you personally, then realize that idea or technology has the potential to help many others.

This process is not an optimal way to form teams, but it is enough for the student teams to gain experience in team formation and for teams to implement in an accelerated manner the 24 Steps over the course of a semester. From the ideas in the class that turn into businesses, some teams stay intact, but far more often teams undergo a healthy reconfiguration of their membership at the end of the semester to create a stronger, more unified team that is better suited to capture an opportunity on a longer-term basis.

This is an important evolutionary process. Your choice of co-founders is extremely important. The research at MIT suggests that businesses with multiple founders are more successful than those founded by an individual. Your first goal is to assess the needs of potential customers, focusing on a target customer with the goal of achieving product—market fit—a product that matches what customers in a specific market are interested in buying.

Focus is very important because entrepreneurs have very limited time and resources and so must be hyper- efficient.

Figure 0. Narrow your list down to your top 6—12 markets. Gather primary market research on your top 6—12 markets. For success in entrepreneurship, there are some glasses that are better than others to view the situation.

Now you will begin the 24 Steps by taking that idea or technology and brainstorming a wide array of potential customers who might be interested in some application of it.

Then you will choose 6—12 top opportunities and do in-depth primary market research, where you directly interview potential customers to learn more about them.

While all those are great things for a business to have, none of them is the right answer. The single necessary and sufficient condition for a business is a paying customer. The day someone pays you money for your product or service, you have a business, and not a day before. This simple truth will keep you focused on what is important.

You cannot define a business as a product, because if nobody buys your product, you simply do not have a business. The marketplace is the final arbiter of success. Now, just because you have a paying customer does not mean you have a good business. In order to have a good, sustainable business, you will need to gain enough customers paying enough money within a relatively short period of time so you do not run out of capital, but instead, become profitable.

And as a startup, you have few resources, so every action you take must be hyper-efficient. Therefore, you will not start by building a product or hiring developers or recruiting salespeople. Instead, you will take a customer-driven approach by finding an unmet need and building your business around it.

By creating a new market, you will have a very high, if not dominant, market share that you can use as a basis for future expansion. To create this company in a newly defined market space, you will focus on a target customer. A target customer is a group of potential customers who share many characteristics and who would all have similar reasons to buy a particular product. Focus is the most important skill for an entrepreneur, and as you will find throughout these steps, it is difficult to focus too much.

In an adjacent market, some customer characteristics will be the same as your primary market, but there will be enough differences to require tailoring your strategy appropriately. That process is covered in Steps 14 and You first hear from your friend Sally, who read in the newspaper that camping equipment is a lucrative market, so she suggests you sell tents.

Your cousin Joe chimes in; he wants waterproof underwear. A neighbor thinks that easy-to-clean stuffed animals for children would be just lovely.

To design and execute any of these products will take time and resources. If they all have teeth, the market size is 1. If each person buys three toothbrushes a year, we could sell 3. Within the broad definition of a customer, there is the end user, who ultimately uses your product, and the economic buyer, who makes the final decision about whether to acquire the product.

The end user and economic buyer can be the same person, depending on the situation. But there are two cases in which this definition gets more complicated. The first is when your business model calls for both primary customers end users and secondary customers economic buyers in order to make money. The second case is called a two-sided or multi-sided market, where you need multiple target customers for your business to exist. If you have a multi-sided market, you will complete each step once for each side of the market.

But you will likely find through your primary market research that one side of the market is more critical to win for your business to succeed; so you will want to focus there. For instance, two of my former students, Kim Gordon and Shambhavi Kadam, started Mediuum, an iTunes-like platform for digital artwork.

As they investigated this concept, they realized that getting the demand side of customers to sign up to put digital art on their mobile phones, tablets, PC, and TVs was not the challenge. The hard work was going to be signing up the digital artists who create the art and having them agree to make it available. Thus, while both supply and demand were needed for the new venture to succeed, their primary focus would be the digital artists.

Even at this early stage, talking about your idea or technology with potential customers will give you clear and accurate feedback for your market segmentation. You will find them at trade shows, through connections with fellow students and professors perhaps some of them would have been potential customers at their previous jobs , or, if others have heard about your idea or technology, perhaps they will be contacting you, suggesting potential uses.

The best scenario is when you are the potential customer yourself and have a deep understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. If you have an idea, you may think you already have a specific market and a specific application in mind.

However, as a first-time entrepreneur, you will want to carefully determine whether your perceptions are correct. Likely, your defined market is not specific enough, but you may also find that the market you have in mind is not a good match for your idea, or that other markets are better for starting a business.

Be open-minded and creative. If technology is your primary passion, you probably want to consider a wider range of industries than just education. If your passion is education, you can simply segment the education industry, but be open to other solutions besides one involving a high degree of technology. While you may have domain expertise in a certain field, that field may not have any good applications for your technology, so be open to different industries.

Later on, you will filter your ideas to take your passions into account. Start by identifying potential industries for your idea. Then, list who might benefit in each industry from your idea. Focus on end users, not customers, because you will need a committed group of end users to have a sustainable business. For instance, if your idea is to improve education with technology, who would be your end user?

Teachers, administrators, parents, and students are all potential end users. Each category can be further subdivided. Are you focusing on end users in universities or in grade school? What different types of schools are these end users associated with? Which countries and regions do the end users work and live in?

To elaborate on one example, in the grade school category for teachers, there are public school, private school, parochial school, and homeschool teachers. Within public school teachers, there are various levels of schooling, depending on their country and region. Within each category, there are urban, suburban, and rural schools. In most middle and high schools, teachers specialize in a specific subject. Even within a subject, such as social studies, there are subcategories such as history and geography.

In most schools, there are art, music, and physical education teachers, as well as paraprofessionals and special education teachers. See Figure 1.

Figure 1. Segment first, and then determine whether any categories are common enough to merge. Next, identify the different tasks your end user performs. For a high school science teacher in a suburban area, these tasks may include teaching, grading, preparing lessons, training, discipline, dealing with parents, ordering chemicals, and more. An elementary school teacher in a major city may not need to order chemicals, but may need to buy classroom supplies, sometimes out of pocket.

You may find enough similarities between certain subcategories that you can group them, depending on what your idea is, but you will find that out during your primary market research.

Do not start combining categories without knowing more about your customer. Sometimes, my students have an easy time segmenting end users when starting with an employee like a teacher, but have a much harder time when the end user is a consumer, purchasing for personal or household use. A useful question to ask is why the consumer would purchase a product in a particular industry segment. For the education segmentation above, why would a parent purchase a product that improves education?

Or, consider a technology such as a long-lasting battery. If you are looking at the transportation industry, and have segmented down to consumers buying a vehicle for personal transportation, why would a consumer use such a product?

Some possibilities include environmental conscientiousness, high performance, luxury, convenience, and value. Even within high performance, you can subdivide between consumers looking for a low-cost but high-performance vehicle, and price-insensitive consumers whose primary objective is high performance. Be broad and expansive when segmenting end users for your new product.

You are brainstorming now; later, you will narrow the list as you start to analyze each segment. Step 1B: Narrow You have by now identified numerous potential end users and applications for your idea or technology. Your next task is to list the top 6—12 particularly interesting market opportunities, where a market opportunity consists of a specific end user and one or a handful of applications. As you do primary market research, the specific application you have in mind may not be one the end user is looking for, so it is better to focus on end users for now.

In Inside the Tornado, Geoffrey Moore identifies five criteria that the company Documentum used to narrow down its list of 80 potential markets. I have expanded this number to seven by splitting the first criterion into two parts, and adding one of my own to incorporate the passions of your founding team into the discussion.

Is the target customer well-funded? If the customer does not have money, the market is not attractive because it will not be sustainable and provide positive cash flow for the new venture to grow. Is the target customer readily accessible to your sales force? You want to deal directly with customers when starting out, rather than rely on third parties to market and sell your product, because your product will go through iterations of improvement very rapidly, and direct customer feedback is an essential part of that process.

Also, since your product is substantially new and never seen before and potentially disruptive , third parties may not know how to be effective at creating demand for your product. Does the target customer have a compelling reason to buy? Would the customer buy your product instead of another similar solution? Or, is the customer content with whatever solution is already being used?

Remember that on many occasions, your primary competition will be the customer doing nothing. Can you today, with the help of partners, deliver a whole product? The example here that I often use in class is that no one wants to buy a new alternator and install it in their car, even if the alternator is much better than what they currently have. They want to buy a car. That is, they want to buy a whole functional solution, not assemble one themselves.

You will likely need to work with other vendors to deliver a solution that incorporates your product, which means that you will need to convince other manufacturers and distributors that your product is worth integrating into their workflows.

Is there entrenched competition that could block you? Rare is the case where no other competitors are vying to convince a customer to spend their budget on some product to meet the identified need. Can the competition block you from starting a business relationship with a customer? And how do you stand out from what your customer perceives as alternatives? If you win this segment, can you leverage it to enter additional segments? If you dominate this market opportunity, are there adjacent opportunities where you can sell your product with only slight modifications to your product or your sales strategy?

Or will you have to radically revise your product or sales strategy in order to take advantage of additional market opportunities? While you want to stay focused on your beachhead market, you do not want to choose a starting market from which you will have a hard time scaling your business.

Geoffrey Moore uses the metaphor of a bowling alley, where the beachhead market is the lead pin, and dominating the beachhead market knocks down the lead pin, which crashes into other pins that represent either adjacent market opportunities or different applications to sell to the customer in your beachhead market.

Is the market consistent with the values, passions, and goals of the founding team? Therefore, an important factor for us was whether we could show results in an acceptable time frame in whichever market we chose. Start by asking these questions at an industry level. Then, consider what the answers would be for the end user of your product. Within an industry, if you have segmented your potential end users by branching out into many categories, like in the education example above, ask the questions at each branching level.

For instance, consider the example from earlier of teachers vs. Your limiting factor is time—you will research each of these markets in depth, and you do not have time to consider an unlimited number of options.

Six to twelve market opportunities is more than sufficient—with a realistic number being much closer to six than twelve. Because you are identifying a new market opportunity for a product that does not yet exist, you will not be able to rely on Google searches or on research reports from research firms.

If there is already a market research report out there with all the information you need, it is probably too late for your new venture. You have missed the window of opportunity—someone else has beaten you to the market. Instead, you will gather the vast majority of your information from direct interaction with real potential customers about their situations, pain points, opportunities, and market information. Unfortunately, there are few shortcuts in this process. While you should find out what you can about customers and markets before you talk to potential customers, it is impossible to overstate the importance of doing direct customer research, as any other sources of information and knowledge are frequently superficial and likely of minimal value.

If the potential customer senses you are trying to sell them something, they will change their behavior; they will either say little or say things that are related to the market opportunity you seem to be presenting them, rather than providing you with new, innovative ideas for markets. As a result, you will get less market data, and what you do get will be biased. Likewise, you should not count on your customer to design your product or tell you the answer to their problems.

The goal of this research is to understand their pain points, and later design a solution that will be of great value to them. Actions are more important than words, because people sometimes say things that are contrary to how they actually do things. You will want to talk with as many end users as possible, but individuals who are not end users may also give you valuable advice or may point you in the right direction.

You may even find that you misidentified the end user in your segmentation. There are a few key factors that are integral to collecting accurate information: You must have a high level of intellectual curiosity. You must be fearless about getting on the phone, in the car, or on a plane to pursue this information.

You must have an ability to listen and get people to talk. You must be open-minded and unbiased, and never presuppose a solution inquiry, not advocacy. You must have the ability to explain what the essence of your proposed offering might look like while also being flexible. You must have time and patience to devote to this important step. There are three important caveats when conducting your primary market research: 1.

Organize Your Research The main categories you are trying to obtain information on for each market are: 1. End User: Who specifically would be using your product? You have narrowed down your end user some already, but as you do primary market research you may find the category can be even further segmented. Application: What would the end user be using your product for? What is the task that would be dramatically improved by your new venture?

Benefits: What is the actual value that the end user would gain from the use of your new product? Not feature or functions, but specifically what the end user gains from the product. Is it a time savings? A cost savings? Additional profit? Lead Customers: Who are the most influential customers that others look to for thought leadership and adoption of new technology?

They must be respected by others as innovative and successful customers who purchase because the product provides them with real value and not simply bragging rights. Market Characteristics: What about this market would help or hinder the adoption of new technology? Size of the Market: Roughly, how many potential customers exist if you achieve percent market penetration?

Competition: Who, if anyone, is making similar products—real or perceived? You will likely need to bundle your product with products from other manufacturers so that customers can easily buy your product and have full functionality.

At the very least, you will need to identify which other products your customer will need to buy to use your product. For instance, if you are developing a game for the Sega Dreamcast video-game console, your customers will need to be able to purchase the console as well. It is easiest to organize this information in a matrix, where each potential market opportunity is a column header, and each category of information is a row.

The SensAble example further on shows how such a matrix could be organized. There may be other categories that are relevant to your situation. Also, some of the rows in the example matrix may be unnecessary for your situation; but this general format can be a good starting point for you to customize as appropriate. This matrix has proven to be helpful for hundreds of companies; also some have added or removed categories of information to make the matrix more valuable to their specific context.

Give your full attention to this research for at least a few weeks and maybe much longer if your situation permits. Also, make sure you are talking to customers in the target market to get good data. The amount of time you spend will depend largely on how effective your team is at getting primary market research. You should spend enough time so that you can fill out the matrix for all your top segments with some accuracy.

The objective is just to get an accurate assessment of the market opportunities so you can move to the next step. After all, this is Step 1—you have 23 more steps to go! You will likely revisit this step as you get more information from the future steps. While the steps are presented in a sequential manner for the sake of simplicity, they are often iterative in nature, as the overview illustration shows at the beginning of the book Six Themes of the 24 Steps.

Based in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and specifically in the Robotics Laboratory supervised by the legendary Professor Rodney Brooks, then-MIT undergraduate Thomas Massie created, working with his Professor Ken Salisbury, a new device that would give its user the sense of touching virtual objects using a stylus- like interface.

The device, named the PHANToM, would simulate shapes, motion, weight, and many other physical properties by increasing or decreasing the resistance or force felt by a user when moving a finger or stylus as shown in Figure 1.

As others heard about this breakthrough idea and subsequent technological implementation, Massie received queries from all over the world about potential uses for the technology. He started to sell versions of the lab product. He was interested in building a much more commercially oriented business that could have a bigger impact on the world, so we joined forces to create SensAble Technologies. We worked hard to find a scalable market opportunity that would allow our business to reach the goals we had set out to achieve: being a company worth tens of millions of dollars in the relatively short time horizon of five years or less.

I worked with our business development manager, John Ranta, who had experience in previous startups identifying such market opportunities and doing the hard work of primary market research with customers to discover their real needs. We spent weeks building out a list of potential markets, using our current customers, trade show feedback, incoming product inquiries, and our own imaginations as sources of ideas. No idea was too crazy at this point: a boxing channel, fixing space stations, computer mice that vibrated, helping to perform medical surgery, pornography, new computer games, educational opportunities, data analysis, flight simulators, virtual worlds, museums, sports training, computers for the blind.

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Innovation principles to bring about meaningful and sustainablegrowth in your organization Using a list of more than 2, successful innovations,including Cirque du Soleil, early IBM mainframes, the Ford Model-T,and many more, the authors applied a proprietary algorithm anddetermined ten meaningful groupings—the Ten Types ofInnovation—that provided insight into innovation.

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Now in its third edition, The Suitcase Entrepreneur teaches readers how to package and sell their skills to earn enough money to be able to work and live anywhere, build a profitable online business, and live life on their own terms. After eight years of working in the soul-crushing bureaucracy of the corporate world, Natalie Sisson quit her high-paying job and moved to Canada, started a blog, and cofounded a technology company. In just eighteen months she learned how to build an online platform from scratch, and then left to start her own business—which involved visiting Argentina to eat empanadas, play Ultimate Frisbee, and launch her first digital product.

After five years, she now runs a six-figure business from her laptop, while living out of a suitcase and teaching entrepreneurs worldwide how to build a business and lifestyle they love. With a new introduction, as well as updated resources and information, this practical guide uncovers the three key stages of creating a self-sufficient business and how to become a successful digital nomad and live life on your own terms.

Skip to content. Disciplined Entrepreneurship. Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook. Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook Book Review:. Self Discipline for Entrepreneurs. Self Discipline for Entrepreneurs Book Review:. Fast Forward. Fast Forward Book Review:. Their model presents insight on how a paradigm shift among the youths and the society in general from job search to business development may well lead to entrepreneurs and self-productive citizens.

The authors hope to inspire, inform, and encourage todays youths to become tomorrows entrepreneurs, leaders, and good citizens. The topics include the following: Conquering personal and cultural roadblocks to entrepreneurship Shifting mental and physical focus from employee to employer Avoiding common pitfalls in starting and running a sustainable small business Making the best out of being a youth The authors urge the Nigerian youths to avoid falling into a victim mentality and start their paradigm shift into the mindsets of entrepreneurs.

Digital Entrepreneurship Author : Jonathan P. This textbook provides students with expert guidance on using technology platforms to start new ventures. With an award-winning approach, the author guides readers through the process of a lean startup, taking a "digital first" approach to entrepreneurship.

Students using the book will emerge with enhanced understanding of different digital business models, analytical skills for digital ventures, and the confidence to move from prototype to product. Online resources such as slides, a sample syllabus, and exercises encourage the classroom to become an interactive and dynamic space. Whether it's your first business or your fifth, realistic assessment from the outset can save you a lot of time and money; why pour your heart and soul into a venture that is doomed to fail?

Instead, position yourself to win from the very beginning. In this book, accomplished venture capitalists share their insight on startups and entrepreneurs: who will fail, who will succeed and why, and what you should do to give your business the very best shot at becoming a global success story. You'll learn how to evaluate your business with a critical eye, and how early customer development can be key in turning a good idea into a great opportunity.

If you're serious about building a business that lasts, this book provides invaluable guidance that you really cannot miss. More than five million people will launch a business this year, and many of them will be great ideas—yet few will be around in five years, and even fewer in ten years.

A great idea is not enough to build a successful business. You need to fortify your idea with the proper foundation, and a scaffolding of good planning and early action. This book shows you how. Assess your business's viability using the 10x Rule Learn when you can quit your day job—or not Take the key steps to making your business succeed Discover the opportunities worth selling everything for This expert author team has witnessed more than 30, pitches over two decades, and have participated in over startup launches.

Startup Opportunities gives you the benefit of their experience to help you start strong and stay strong. MIT is world-famous as a launching pad for entrepreneurs. MIT alumni have founded at least 30, active companies, employing an estimated 4. In the s, twenty to thirty ventures were spun off each year to commercialize technologies developed in MIT labs with intellectual property licensed by MIT to these companies ; in the same decade, MIT graduates started an estimated firms per year.

How has MIT become such a hotbed of entrepreneurship? In From the Basement to the Dome, Jean-Jacques Degroof describes how MIT's problem-solving ethos, multidisciplinary approach, and experimental mindset nurture entrepreneurship. Degroof explains that, at first, the culture of entrepreneurship sprang from such extracurricular activities as forums, clubs, and competitions.

Eventually, the Institute formally supported these activities, offering courses in entrepreneurship. Degroof describes why entrepreneurship is so uniquely aligned with MIT's culture: a history of bottom-up decision-making, a tradition of academic excellence, a keen interest in problem-solving, a belief in experimentation, and a tolerance for failure on the way to success.

Entrepreneurship is the logical outcome of MIT's motto, Mens et Manus mind and hand , translating theories and scientific discoveries into products and businesses--many of which have the goal of solving some of the world's most pressing problems.