Category Archives: Enterprise Education

Blog, Enterprise Education, Entrepreneurial Mindset

Entrepreneurship as a career choice – Millennial Entrepreneurs

The Millennials are making the career choice of being an entrepreneur.

Promoting entrepreneurship as a viable career option and supporting self-employment on an higher educational campus has both community and economic relevance. The role of higher educational campuses to nurture and develop the entrepreneurial and innovative talent is foundation to creating the next generation within our community. The trend is for millennial University students to be empowered to come out of university with an understanding of entrepreneurship, with a view that these skills and knowledge allow them to make informed life choices.

Millennial Entrepreneurs

Our Millennial Entrepreneurs understand how to start new businesses and take on the risk and rewards of being an founder.  Entrepreneurs are the dreamers who are fuelled by the desire to pioneer, lead, innovate and invent disruptive technologies and products. The tech savvy millennial wants to work the way then want, the hours they want make the opportunities they want.

In the 1980s we saw a massive increase in self employed and now their children are following the footsteps or the desire of their parents and opted for a career that was decided by their elders. However, the opening up of the world economy during the 1990’s and the great advances in tech field has had far reaching impact on the way business was done world over.

Millennial Entrepreneurs Motivation

These momentous changes are opening up new business creation tools and unexplored business models for the young and ambitious who were not satisfied being put in a single career for their entire life. Young people are drawn towards entrepreneurship because:

  1. The desire to be their own boss and have better control
  2. The motivation to take risks in the changed global environment where unexplored new opportunities were present
  3. The ambition to develop and execute a plan right from the ground level
  4. The aim to do well financially and take their growth trajectory to unprecedented level

New Venture Creation (NVC) Programmes are available to equip nascent entrepreneurs with the skills necessary to start a scalable business.  These university degrees have been developed by entrepreneurs to support Millennial Entrepreneurs on the entrepreneurial journey, and to develop the entrepreneur within  alongside an in-depth understanding of how to start and run a business.

Students will be in a class with like-minded Millennial Entrepreneurs developing a strong network of entrepreneurs. Throughout the  degree, the focus will progressively move from entrepreneurial mindset, creativity, venture feasibility and marketing, to business operations, stakeholder communications, sales and growth strategies.

Blog, Data Analytics, Enterprise Education

What skills do you need to be a successful Entrepreneur?

When starting a business, we all come at from different directions, at different ages, different backgrounds. There are so many skills required to run your own startup. Successful Entrepreneur skills, are the ones you’ll need to run everything from serving customers to preparing your accounts. Below are listed 13  core skills required in running a startup business and how you might develop your core skill set further. The successful Entrepreneur skills are:

  1. Opportunity Recognition – The recognition of new markets and opportunities, such as a new customers’ need is core to becoming a successful entrepreneur.
  2. Ideation – Ideation is the creative process of generating, developing, and communicating new ideas. Always write your ideas down in a book and come back to them when you can do something about it.
  3. Research & Analysis – This involves both qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis. Understanding the customers, competitors and costs structure are important in making a startup work.
  4. Resources Identification – Working out the resource requirements then leads to determining what types of resources you will need to start-up and operate your startup.
  5. Risk Analysis – This process of defining and analysing the dangers to your startup business posed by potential natural and human-caused events.
  6. Tactical Planning – As a startup the horizon is low, so focus on this process of outlining business plans for the coming year. This differs from strategic planning as strategic planning encompasses longer-term goals that reflect the company’s direction and its purpose outlined in its mission statement.
  7. Operational Design – Operational design is the first level of strategy implementation and rests upon operational art. This cognitive approach uses your skill, knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgment to develop operations to organise and employ the resources available.
  8. Business Modelling – A business model is the map of how a startup generates revenue and makes a profit from its value proposition. From this a business plan and processes may be derived.
  9. Cash Flow – In the early days of a business maintaining a healthy cash level, liquidity ensure the business survives. Cash is king.
  10. Team Building – As a new business building a team is important, which requires various types of activities used to enhance social relations and define roles within team are developed and maintained.
  11. Branding – Branding is one of the most important aspects of any business, it develops you icon and a connection with your suppliers, customers and financial stakeholders.
  12. Marketing – The communications of you value proposition should generate leads which can be turned into sales.
  13. Negotiating & Selling – Getting the right prices from your suppliers and selling at the right price is fundamental for a startup to grow. These skills go hand in hand together.
Blog, Enterprise Education, Skills Development, Venture Capital and Funding

7 obstacles experienced by entrepreneurs

As an entrepreneur we have lots of do, but sometimes we just do it wrong, we let obstacles get in our way. So what are the typical obstacles we entrepreneurs have to deal with:

  1. Perfectionism – For entrepreneurs, practice doesn’t make perfect; action does. You simply cannot wait until you are 100 percent ready before you take action. Think MVP.
  2. Procrastination –  Sometimes its easier to delay the decision, the action or even dealing with the problem, so each day “Eat the Frog” and take action of the real issues within your business.
  3. Fear – Entrepreneurs’ resolve is tested from the very first step of starting a business. In fact, one entrepreneur compared starting a business to jumping off a cliff and assembling your parachute on the way down.
  4. Worry – As an entrepreneur, worry comes with the territory. In fact, over a third of entrepreneurs told Gallup they worried a lot about yesterday. While worry is a quotidian experience, it is not productive. You have to make peace with the things that concern you, and not let them stop you from taking action and pursuing your dreams.
  5. Financing – Experienced entrepreneurs don’t have it easy when it comes to funding a new business, but they do have a few advantages over newcomers. They might have a pool of capital from a business they previously sold or a steady stream of revenue they can use to fund a new business’s cash flow.
  6. Team building – This is especially hard if you’ve never run or managed a team before, but even if you have management experience, picking the right team for a startup is stressful and difficult. It’s not enough to find candidates who fill certain roles — you also need to consider their cost to the business, their culture fit and how they’ll work as part of your overall team. Such considerations are exceptionally hard when you’re under the pressure of filling those positions as soon as possible.
  7. Decision-making – Believe it or not, this is probably the most stressful challenge on this list. New entrepreneurs are forced to make hundreds of decisions a day, from big, company-impacting decisions, to tiny, hour-affecting ones. Decision fatigue is a real phenomenon, and most new entrepreneurs will experience it if they aren’t prepared for the new level of stress.
Enterprise Education, Entrepreneurial Mindset, Resources, Skills Development, Training

Venture Creation – BA (Hons) Entrepreneurship Programme

In the last year I have had the amazing  opportunity to design a venture creation BA (Hons) Entrepreneurship Programme which is oriented towards students who wish to combine study towards an honours degree with the opportunity to start their own business in a supported environment with guidance from specialist lecturers, practising entrepreneurs and mentors. Over the years I have seen many programmes and wanted to create something for Entrepreneurs, the student and for practitioners.

This is a practice-oriented degree, which focuses on the development of the students’ entrepreneurial effectiveness. This is achieved by embracing the concept of ‘learning by doing’ which ensures students are acquiring real knowledge and practical expertise to support their business start-up and business growth aspirations. There is a focus on real business experiences including master classes, enterprise events and interactions with local and global entrepreneurs. This philosophy is extended within the assessment primarily for (rather than ‘of’) learning Entrepreneurship (QAA (2012) Enterprise and Entrepreneurship Education: Guidance for UK Higher Education Providers, pp9).

Similarly, although there is an inherent emphasis on learning within the learner’s own start-up venture, the Entrepreneurship skills acquired will be transferable to other business environments and learning opportunities.

This BA (Hons) Entrepreneurship Programme aligns with the nation and international government agenda (The Impact and Effectiveness of Entrepreneurship Policy, NESTA 2013) and seeks to increase the number of entrepreneurs in the economy.

A range of teaching pedagogies are adopted to ensure the curriculum enhances the learning of all students both in the startup and in group learning environments. In addition to lectures, seminars, videos, podcasts, presentations and visiting entrepreneurs, students will participate in action learning sets and interactive activities to apply learning from businesses experiences in their startup. These approaches are intended to take into account the principles of inclusivity: the types of learner, their startup business, their prior experience and expectations and how they learn and will be supported to learn effectively.

Given the focus on developing a continued learning environment in which students develop an entrepreneurial mindset, there is an emphasis within the BA (Hons) Entrepreneurship Programme on tutoring and mentoring to support individual requirements, and also to reflect (at a meta-cognitive level) on their learning process. The programme is supported by more than 10 Entrepreneurs in Residence, regional business support agencies and local businesses.

Blog, Enterprise Education, Skills Development, Training

Setting Objectives when Starting up a Business

When Setting Objectives when Starting up a Business you should always use SMART objectives -the most well known method for setting objectives. S.M.A.R.T refers to the acronym that describes the key characteristics of meaningful objectives, which are:

Specific

  • WHAT am I going to do?
  • WHY is this important for me to do?
  • WHO is going to do what? Who else need to be involved?
  • WHEN do I want this to be completed?
  • HOW am I going to do this?

Measureable

  • How do I know when I have done it?
  • Can these measurements be obtained?
  • What are the numbers, quantity, comparisons?

Achievable

  • Can we get it done in the proposed timeframe?
  • Do I understand the limitations and constraints?
  • Can we do this with the resources we have?
  • Has anyone else done this successfully?
  • Is this possible?

Realistic

  • Do you have the resources available to achieve this objective?
  • Do I need to revisit priorities in my life to make this happen?
  • Is it possible to achieve this objective?

Time-Bound

  • When will this objective be accomplished?
  • Is there a stated deadline? (a defined time line)

Setting Goals Summary

Remember what gets measured gets done, so write your goals down, share them constantly with those who can help, are part of the goal and your team. Keep refining your goals to ensure achievable. If necessary, split goals down into achievable tasks.