What makes a great entrepreneur?
What is about them that makes them stand out in the crowd? Ambition, creativity and a resilience to risk are all part of the recipe, but these are traits that cannot be taught at business school.
A Darden professor has tried to approach this from a different angle. By attempting to discover how entrepreneurs think, Saras Sarasvathy hopes to be able to transmit this knowledge to aspiring entrepreneurs.
Prof Sarasvathy, associate professor of business administration at Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia approached US entrepreneurs, who had at least 15 years entrepreneurial experience, had started multiple companies which had both failed and succeeded and had taken at least one company public.
After listening to them at length talk about problems they encountered as entrepreneurs she concluded that successful entrepreneurs are improvisers who rely on what she describes as “effectual reasoning” to attain their goals. These entrepreneurs she says “assess how to use their personal strengths and whatever resources they have at hand to develop goals on the fly, while creatively reacting to contingencies”.
Corporate executives by comparison rely on “causal reasoning”, where they set a goal and then seek ways to achieve it.
Posted on February 7, 2011
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