The Despair of Entrepreneurship Professors are perennially popular but doomed business ideas
One of the most dreaded aspects of being an entrepreneurship professor are the hundreds of times that students will come up with the same - bad - business concept when tasked with building businesses of their own. A perennial favorite is dog-walking services. Comes up every semester! Now, I don’t have a problem with dogs or dog walkers, just with a Columbia MBA deciding to put the degree to use in that occupation - doesn’t make much sense.
Of course, every so often a bright idea comes along that defies the common wisdom of the entrepreneurship professor. Just such an inspiration appears to have visited our colleagues over at the Kellogg School, as I read the following story from Business Week.
Tweet This!
Share this article: 
- Posted Rita McGrath on January 30, 2008
- Trackback
- 3 Comments
Business Development Resources for New Entrepreneurs
As a sometime professor of entrepreneurship, I’m frequently approached by would-be entrepreneurs for help in fleshing out their business plans. While I enjoy doing this, it could very easily become a full-time job! I’ve therefore put together a resource list for new entrepreneurs that are free or very low cost, to use during the business definition stage of their ventures and to help them get those first few critical transactions going. Here are some of the resources I point people to:
Small Business Development Centers
Small Business Development Centers are usually associated with universities. These offer training and consulting services, courses, and sometimes contacts and connections to venture capitalists and angel investors. The main web page, including a location locator can be found
here.
Tweet This!
Share this article:
- Posted Rita McGrath on December 20, 2007
- Trackback
- Leave a comment
Columbia Faculty on “What is the Entrepreneurial Mindset”
Entrepreneurship is one of those terms that’s a bit like the old saw about art or pornography - “I can’t define it, but I know it when I see it”. If you want to bring a collection of entrepreneurship academics to a screeching halt, just ask the question “What is entrepreneurship?” This will provoke such a long and heated debate that all other purposes of coming together get lost in the shuffle. This has gone on at least as long as the 18 years I’ve been in the field.
It was therefore interesting for Columbia’s entrepreneurship center to collect different faculty members’ perspectives on the notion of entrepreneurial mindset in one place. You’ll find their definitions and observations here.
Tweet This!Share this article:
- Posted Rita McGrath on December 20, 2007
- Trackback
- Leave a comment
Venture Capitalists may not be so good at stopping failing projects after all
My colleague, Isin Guler, has just published a fascinating study in one of our more erudite management journals. In an exhaustive look at investments made by venture capital companies, she finds that as funding rounds proceed, expected returns to the investment decline. You would think that a hard-nosed VC would just shut the loser down, wouldn’t you? Turns out, not so. In fact, the likelihood of a venture being terminated as a result of poor performance actually declines as more rounds of financing are completed. Isin (a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) suggests that political agendas, the desire to look good before one’s colleagues, a reluctance to admit defeat and giving too much weight to sunk costs all come into play.
It’s a sobering bit of research for those of us (myself among them) who have said that ruthlessly shutting down uncertain projects that don’t meet their goals is key to containing risk in uncertain investments. You also have to wonder - since VC’s are investment professionals, one might expect companies, in which far greater interference from the forces for escalation are likely to be prevalent - to be far worse at making the tough calls.
For those of you interested in the academic paper, the citation is:
Guler, I. 2007. Throwing good money after bad? Political and institutional influences on sequential decision making in the venture capital industry. Admin. Sci. Quart. 52(2) 248-285.
Tweet This!
Share this article:
- Posted Rita McGrath on October 15, 2007
- Trackback
- Leave a comment
Entrepreneurial Japan - that’s news!
This is such a wonderful development to hear about. And I'd like to draw attention here to one of our colleagues, Dr. Takeru Ohe, who has been trying to get Japanese business to think more entrepreneurially for several decades now. One of his latest ventures is to run a summer camp that teaches entrepreneurial skills to youngsters, hoping to take that next generation even further.
To put in a plug for Columbia - we are running a course on creating strategy in July (24-26) that I direct (which means I'm there the whole time) which hopes to draw on some of the entrepreneurial energy now infusing the economy. See the web site http://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/execed/open/programs/japan_strategy.cfm Tweet This!
Share this article:
- Posted Admin on February 27, 2007
- Trackback
- Leave a comment
