Entrepreneurial Competencies

Abstract

What are success-driving skills entrepreneurs bring to the table? In this seminar-style class, we will review the state of knowledge and explore case examples for relevant management, decision-making, and communication styles useful to manage uncertainty and novel contexts. Apart from general intellectual enrichment, you will find room for reflection on your own behaviors and thought patterns.

Objective

This course is designed to provide insight into key behaviors and mindsets that enable human beings to deal with uncertainty and manage the often stressful, sometimes joyful, but for sure high-pressured entrepreneurial life. At the end of this course, participants will: #1 – Have developed a comprehensive understanding of key behaviors and skills useful in the entrepreneurial profession. #2 – Have been exposed to different behavioral concepts & methods relevant for entrepreneurial actors and draw their own conclusions for how to apply them to their own life. #3 – Have obtained a more comprehensive and critical appreciation for what it takes to be a successful professional in entrepreneurial settings (independent ventures or corporate innovation functions). The insights from this course will not only be useful if you consider starting your own company. Many of the themes we will discuss may be equally important for your career in other domains.

Content

*COURSE PHILOSOPHY/MOTIVATION* This course can be taken as an individual course but may also be a great complement or companion to the often more project-focused courses offered at ETH such as "The Lean Startup Academy" [363-1103-00L]. While project-based courses typically focus on skill-building around ideation, validation, pitching, and fundraising for entrepreneurial endeavors, I am adding the proposition there are many more behavioral and mental skills entrepreneurs need to bring to the table. Our goal in this class will be to review those. *GENERAL COURSE DESIGN* This course is designed as a mix of conversations, provoked by the preparation material and by in-class activities. The materials and workshops are geared to help participants reflect on key challenges around entrepreneurship, and how to potentially tackle them. While we will spend quite some time discussing pop-culture opinions and reviewing evidence from scientific research, I also aspire to have participants critically reflect upon and experiment with their own behavioral approaches. *TYPICAL SESSION STRUCTURE* A typical class in this course departs from a set of questions relevant to the entrepreneurial phenomenon. I ask students to come prepared by having reviewed the respective problem set(s) that motivate the session and having engaged with readings and/or other media material shared upfront. In the classroom, we will then review - typically in a dialogue form - what the academic literature and practitioners have to say. We may not always like the answers we find, and sometimes the knowledge about important questions is sketchy at best. That will provide room for debate and to build on the collective wisdom in the class. *COURSE THEMES* Some of the questions we will explore in this course: Session 01 (28.2.): What do entrepreneurs do? Can it be taught? Is entrepreneurship the rewarding career it is often made out to be? What do you need to learn as an entrepreneur? Session 02 (14.3.): What are the enablers and impediments to getting started? What makes some people better perform under stress than others? Session 03 (28.3.): What makes for an effective entrepreneurial team? Why do people contribute to uncertain endeavors and how to keep them motivated? Session 04 (25.4.): What role does rhetoric have in entrepreneurial ventures? How do entrepreneurs communicate vision effectively? Session 05 (16.5.): Apply your wisdom -- analyze and feedback another team on their pitch. Session 06 (23.5.): How to make decisions under uncertainty? What are the key issues in running successful entrepreneurial experimentation programs? Session 07 (30.5.): Resource Mobilization and ethics. Never let the truth get in the way of a good story: Where are the ethical boundaries in entrepreneurial companies? Much of the current practice in entrepreneurship has emerged from practitioners rather than the academic environment and is subsequently infused with colorful stories and selective case examples. However, as we are at a university-level institution, in this class, I aspire to have us critically review what pop-culture wisdom has produced and mirror that against the scientific evidence we have from top-of-class research. We will be equally critical of both :-)

Resources