August 24, 2008
"Entrepreneurs and Angels:
Pioneering the Way"
with Dr. Candy Brush
www.babson.edu
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Circles of Change: Conversations with Dr. Zara Larsen
on Change Leadership and Career Fulfillment
August 24, 2008
“Entrepreneurs and Angels: Pioneering the Way”
Anchoring Points:
- Entrepreneurship is a mindset -- how you think about and approach problems in a given context, regardless of the size of the organization.
- How to identify the opportunity is not necessarily a “eureka”, as much as it is a systematic process of study – research, observing, seeing what others don’t see, scenario planning for the future, and traditional brainstorming and idea-ating
- Honed social skills to bring the right people together to help
- Angel Investing by individuals or groups of individuals occurs when an idea is emerging, typically with their own money ($20,000 to $1 million) and help in tweaking or “opportunity shaping”.
- Venture Capital invests others’ money for accelerated growth of highly innovative ideas (less than 1% of the 25 million businesses in the US garner venture capital).
- The myth -- research has proven there is no difference in propensity to take risk amongst entrepreneurs and large company leaders. Where the difference lies is how entrepreneurs see things, cognition, and approach to taking more action and doing more things.
- A distinguishing characteristic of entrepreneurs is learnable social skills, impression management, and in particular the ability to understand and listen, to perceive how an audience is thinking, and to be very adaptable socially to present the message in different situations.
- Management educational innovations at Babson College include:
- All 400 entering freshman are organized into groups and given $3,000 seed money to start, source and harvest a business
- All MBA students take a creativity module that includes poetry, movement and dance to develop their right brain skills
- Partnership with Olin Engineering for new product realization process
- New “Tri Continent” five year BS/MS International Entrepreneurship includes study experiences in France, China and the US
- For over 20 years, Babson hosts an Entrepreneurship Educators Program to help educators around the world become part of global phenomenon
- Future trends in management education include drawing heavily upon liberal arts foundations to help drive the power of context -- political science, sociology and anthropology.
The emerging ventures in technology have a social media or networking component, taking interactions from a national space to a local connection. Technology can play a role in social networking to get tasks done, but the process of networking depends heavily on personal relationships.
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