perjantai 22. maaliskuuta 2013

Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship (Task 1.)


According to a Harvard Business School professor of Business Administration Tom Eisenmann, the term entrepreneurship is elastic and can mean anything from venture capital-backed startups to any small business. According to the Professor Howard Stevenson, the godfather of entrepreneurship studies at HBS, “entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled”. Dr. Eisenmann argues that this definition works in practice, since entrepreneurship is seen as a distinctive approach to managing rather than a specific stage in an organization's life cycle (i.e., startup). Secondly, it has, and allows a specific role for an individual (i.e., founder), or a constellation of personality attributes (e.g., predisposition for risk taking; preference for independence). Therefor, entrepreneurs can be found in many different types of organizations, including large corporations. This is great news and affirms that entrepreneurship can be an engine of global economic development and a force for positive change in society. If the definition is put into other words, it could be said that an entrepreneur must be inventive, creative, opportunistic, and persuasive, because one rarely has enough resources.
(source: Harvard Business Review, http://blogs.hbr.org/hbsfaculty/2013/01/what-is-entrepreneurship.html)

Intrapreneurship
Definition by www.businessdictionary.com

Practice of entrepreneurship in an established firm. Intrapreneurship applies the 'start up' style of management (characterized by flexibility, innovation, and risk taking) to a secure and stable firm. The objective is to fast track product development (by circumventing the bureaucracy) to take advantage of a new opportunity or to assess feasibility of a new process or design.

Start-ups are a hot new term and they seem to have a close link with intrapreneurship. and the leading papers, such as Helsingin Sanomat, regularly publish articles and news about them and their events. On March 20, 2013, the paper published an article about the annual start-up conference and fair SXSW in Austin, Texas.

The media follows closely the Finnish start-up hatcheries. One of them, the major one, is located in Aalto University. The campus hosts Aaltoes, a Aalto University Entrepreneurship Society, which is the largest entrepreurship society in Europe. It revolves mostly around start-ups (which are serial entrepreneurships), which generally refers to high-tech, high-growth and scalable or other technology-related start-ups. According to them, ”community is a key to serendipity” (http://aaltoes.com/about-us/). Aaltoes has a lofty objective of being Aaltoes' goal is that Finland will be the startup hub of Europe and Russia by 2017. Aaltoes was founded in 2009. The founders of Aaltoes wanted talented people to embrace entrepreneurship and view it as a way to create something new and radical.

On Aaltoes home page, I followed the link to their Twitter hashtag #aaltoes, and there was a Tweet about 10 SXSW 2013 Lessons to Apply in Business:

There seems to be a lot going on as a new wave of entrepreneurship.


Can intrapreneurship be taught? Definitely, I think, but not effectively in a traditional classroom setting. I referred above to the Aalto University Entrepreneurship Society, who are doing Start-Up Sauna, recruiting start-up trainees to the Silicon Valley, conducting events and so on. One could also attend events like SXSW. And all this is definitely vocational.

C) What kind of effect would the development of Intrapreneurial skills have on me as a teacher? Person?

If I could apply the above-mentioned qualities of an (ideal) entrepreneur or intrapreneur, meaning being inventive, creative, opportunistic, and persuasive, these qualities quite well define the prototype of a new-generation person, whether you aim towards entrepreneurship or not. Life is shifting very rapidly, there is not much solid ground underneath. The society with its eroding global economics make sure that this doesn’t happen. You just cannot stick with what you learned or were taught, but just like with iVET, you need to find out stuff and learn by yourself, dig deeper, make many detours, extract and merge impressions, ideas, gut reactions, great lessons, and your life experiences to be “on the nerve of time”.

The teacher must follow the time and should be in the front line of knowledge, skills, and creativity. As the trend is, the teacher is the facilitator and the one who walks beside the learner rather than the one who pours information into student’s brain. The reality is that one teacher cannot know everything, but should be aware of what’s going on around him.





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