My name is Eleanor Shaw
and I am Professor of Entrepreneurship,
working with the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship
here at Strathclyde Business School.
I'm going to be talking with you today about entrepreneurship.
We're going to discuss some of
the traditional views of entrepreneurship,
before we move onto to talk about entrepreneurship
in the 21st century and what that might mean for you.
I thought it would be useful if
we started with some learning objectives,
so that at the end of this short talk
you can review these, undertake some reading,
and just gauge how much you've learnt
about entrepreneurship from this session.
So one of the things that we're going to talk about
are the differences and the relationships
between entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur.
People often think that they are the same thing.
They are related, they are connected;
but they are differences, so we'll talk about that.
We'll also talk about those characteristics
that are commonly associated with entrepreneurs
and with entrepreneurship.
So at the end of this talk you should be able to identify
what those common characteristics are.
We're then going to move on
and we'll actually probably challenge a little bit here,
challenge some of your thinking around entrepreneurship,
because we're going to talk about the different contexts
within which entrepreneurs can be found,
and within which entrepreneurship can occur.
And then we'll finish at the end
by a short discussion of why and how
entrepreneurial behaviours are relevant
to you, to me, to all of us in contemporary society.
So those are the four learning objectives
around which I've structured this short talk.
And as I've said,
I recommend you review those now,
and then at the end of the class.
The first thing you're probably wondering
is what is entrepreneurship?
Now, as you might imagine,
there's been a lot of time spent discussing
and trying to define what we mean by entrepreneurship.
It's about vision, it's about taking risk,
it's about innovation.
So we can regard entrepreneurship
as the ability to create or build something,
to make things happen,
often with very few resources.
The implications around this definition are
that entrepreneurship requires those involved
to have a strong vision and a strong motivation;
this is something they really want to do.
Also a willingness to take risks,
given the fact that entrepreneurship often happens
when people have access to very few resources.
That means it can be a risky option for people,
so they need to be able to take risks.
Related to that,
because entrepreneurs often do not have access
to everything that they need to make their idea,
their business, their new way of thinking happen,
they need to use their networks, their contacts,
their relationships to try to gather together,
all of the resources that they need.
We also call this bricolage;
the idea that you can bring together different resources
to help make things happen.
So these are some of the aspects
that we might consider when we talk about entrepreneurship.
I think it's also worthwhile talking a little bit
about prospectives on entrepreneurship.
As an academic study this is a fairly new topic.
Entrepreneurship itself as a process
is something that is age old;
it's been happening for centuries,
well before the industrial revolution in fact.
But as a study, as an area of study,
as something that we can learn about,
it's a new subject.
And what's also important for you guys to recognise,
and I think this is very relevant for MDP,
is that entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary subject.
It draws upon economics, business history,
finance, marketing, human resources,
operations, man science;
it draws upon all of the different subjects
that we engage with here at Strathclyde Business School.
A second point that's important to stress about entrepreneurship
is that it's a process.
This is not a black box activity,
it's a process that individuals,
and groups of individuals,
maybe teams within organisations
get involved with when they want to do something new,
when they want to create something new.
Now, this is where you might find some of your
preconceptions about entrepreneurship being challenged.
Because what entrepreneurship can deliver
is sometimes a new enterprise, a new venture,
but not always.
It might be a new innovation,
it might be a new way of looking at things,
it might be a new business model.
And of course a really good example to think of here
is the internet and other technological developments,
like Web 2.0.
These innovations have really changed
the way in which certain industry sectors operate,
the way in which they're organised,
and they've created tremendous opportunities
for businesses to look at things in a different way,
and indeed to structure their business offerings
in a different way.
This next slide is really important; creative destruction.
This is something that many entrepreneurship scholars
are interested in.
This is a term that was originally coined
by the Austrian economist Schumpeter.
And Schumpeter has spoken about creative destruction
to suggest the process of creative destruction
is the essential fact about capitalism.
Now, I think that can be much debated
because when we look, as we will in a moment,
about what we mean by creative destruction,
what we find is that the activity of creative destruction
can have economic, societal, and environmental impacts.
So I do think that we can challenge
what Schumpeter says here about capitalism.
Anyway, let's leave that aside.
What do we mean by creative destruction?
And how does that impact upon and relate to entrepreneurship?
So creative destruction is disruptive.
Why is it disruptive?
It's disruptive because it might involve
a new innovation, a new way of looking
and a new way of doing things.
Now, when these innovations and new ways,
new prospectives come together or happen separately
what tends to happen is that markets
are shaken up and they're reshaped;
they become something quite different from what they were.
Now, examples of this that you might be able to relate to
and actually have been around for quite some time,
are low cost airlines.
And if we think here about low cost airlines
like EasyJet and Ryanair,
they have completely reshaped the way in which
the airline industry organises itself.
The move towards online check-in,
the move towards buying a seat
and then paying for the extras that you need,
30, 40 year ago that way of buying an airline seat
would never have happened.
But with new technologies
and new ways of thinking about things
these low cost airlines have disrupted the airline market.
Important to entrepreneurship is also this notion of
being creative, being innovative.
So the creative component of creative destruction
is that this shaking up of markets,
the shaking up of industries,
is an outcome of creativity and innovation.
It's about doing something new,
thinking about your industry, your market,
in a different way.
And I've provided a couple of examples here.
The transport one comes up again.
And if we go right back to the industrial revolution in fact,
either before, during and throughout the industrial revolution,
if we think about transport and steam power,
the invention of steam power made trains possible.
And that at the time of the industrial revolution
really just changed the way in which individuals
were able to get around the countryside,
and indeed contributed to the industrial revolution.
So we might not think it now,
but at the time the invention of steam power
was extremely creative and it was extremely destructive
in terms of how transport was made available.
More recently if we think about the internet,
now, I'm suggesting here that one way
in which the internet has really changed industries
is in terms of information management.
And we can look for anything on the internet now.
We can actually get more information
than we need from the internet.
But the internet and associated technologies
like Google, like Web 2.0, like Facebook,
these are all providing us with different ways
in which we can engage with one another
and also ways in which we can manage our information.
An even more recent example,
if we think about Twitter,
which I think it was about 2007
that Twitter was first brought to the market,
when Twitter was introduced
it was introduced as a business communication tool.
And look at what's happened there.
Not only has Twitter changed the way
in which businesses interact online,
particularly getting their message out there
and speaking with their clients,
it's also had an impact on the way in which celebrities
and well-known individuals engage with their fan base.
And most recently if we think about the Arab Spring
Twitter really was influential in
informing the rest of the world
of what was happening there.
And therefore we might see a connection
between Twitter and social uprising.
So creative destruction then really can be fundamental
to some aspects of entrepreneurship.
So we've talked a little bit about the process of entrepreneurship,
let's consider the entrepreneur for a moment.
Because historically individuals are often regarded
as driving this process of entrepreneurship.
And if we look at the literature for a moment or two
there are three different views
that we can find about entrepreneurship.
Cantillon who is the French economist
dating way back to the 1750s,
he actually regarded the entrepreneur as
exchanging risk for profit.
So this notion of risk being important again
to the entrepreneur is born out in this definition.
And also the idea that an entrepreneur
will engage in risky behaviour because
they think there's a payoff, they think there's a profit.
Historically that profit is seen as a personal profit,
as personal financial profit,
but as we'll see in a moment or two,
many more entrepreneurs are engaging in risky behaviour
not for personal financial profit,
but for societal and environmental reasons.
And we might then coin these individuals social entrepreneurs.
We'll revisit them just in a moment or two.
A second perspective in the entrepreneur,
someone closer to home, someone who studied at Glasgow,
Adam Smith, the famous economist.
He provides a UK perspective
that very firmly regards entrepreneurs
as central to free markets and to capitalist economies.
He regards entrepreneurs as being the industrialist,
the owners of the means to production
who make things happen.
And again, I think we can probably challenge that view
of entrepreneurship in contemporary society.
A third view is offered by Schumpeter,
and we've already spoken about Schumpeter's view
of creative destruction.
And this is very much a North American perspective on entrepreneurs.
And I quite like this perspective,
because Schumpeter and his colleagues
think of entrepreneurs as being agents of change.
Individuals, groups of individuals who have the motivation
and at their hands, or at their disposal
the means to make change happen.
And if we think about contemporary society,
which is really fluctuating, flexible, difficult to predict,
individuals who can grasp change, who enjoy change,
who can make change happen,
actually has emerged as important economic
and social actors in the fabric of today's society.
