Management and entrepreneurship for it industry textbook pdf download

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Profiles of entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial firms would enhance the content. Case studies would allow readers to apply the principles behind the theories. End of the chapter questions would reinforce chapter content. The book is comprehensive in that it does a good job of cataloging the different facets of entrepreneurship. It is well referenced and useful as a compendium of resources on the topic. On the other hand, it is mostly suitable as a resource for Comprehensiveness rating: 3 see less.

On the other hand, it is mostly suitable as a resource for people who study entrepreneurship--as opposed to people who practice entrepreneurship. There are no exercises nor any guidance offered to students about how to implement or practice any aspect of what is discussed although the book offers many references to other sources that do.

The book is relevant, and will stay that way, as a compendium of techniques and processes related to entrepreneurship and innovation.

It includes information about the dominant teaching method today--lean startup. If and when a new teaching method or innovative pedagogy appears, then it will need to be refreshed. As a practitioner I found it laden with terminology, mostly pulled from the literature, that will be relevant to people who study entrepreneurship but would not be that useful to practitioners.

The chapters are highly modular and can easily be lifted out and used as references specifically for the topics they cover.

This book is a compendium of the history of and science of entrepreneurship. It is a reference that may have value to other educators, but it would not be appropriate as a textbook for a class whose goal is to teach students the practice of entrepreneurship or how to develop an entrepreneurial mindset.

I thought the text covered many areas of entrepreneurship that are important, however seems as though a deeper explanation on many topics could have enhanced a lecture or classroom discussion. I recognize that even though entrepreneurship is a I recognize that even though entrepreneurship is a very broad topic and there have been many texts devoted to the creation, launch and building of a business that was not the goal of this text.

I took the text to the literal explanation that there would be exercises or activities to explain or reinforce the concepts of entrepreneurship.

The text did a good job of actually explaining the history and gestation of the modern day entrepreneurship concepts with very strong specific examples of entrepreneur quotes and stories. I would rate the overall comprehensiveness as a 3 for the reason that I would have enjoyed more depth in the actual examples offered.

This book is designed in my mind as valuable tool for the instructor to use as a lecture guide. I thought the accuracy of content and the cited research was good for a text that focused on theory of entrepreneurship. I reviewed some of the citations and know of some of the authors that were referenced and believe the author select professors who are leaders in their field and certainly will enhance the credibility.

I think the author validates the importance of entrepreneurship in today's higher education curriculum. The text content is timeless, meaning that the building blocks and foundation of the content will be relevant for a long time to come. I believe it will be easy to add and update new findings in entrepreneurial research and pedagogue as more research and examples can be used as references.

Many of the examples used to support theory are ideas and examples I currently use in the classroom with other text. That being said for the concept of OER materials I thought this text covered the topic with a good foundation and the knowledge a student derives from this text will provide a good starting point in the concept and ideas of entrepreneurship.

I think there are some opportunities to write clearer content either for the Canadian market or the US market, but one text does not fit well in both markets. I found the text to read in format not content like a published paper. I think it needs to be more reader friendly. Perhaps a listicle format chunking the content into smaller sections would be more appealing to a university student.

Even though headers are used effectively I think using different color headers, or font size could add to the appeal and engage the reader with more relevant examples. The use of single spacing also seems like a deterrent to read in sections and add to the readers comprehension. I liked the titles of each chapter, however I would recommend moving chapter 9 Innovation and Entrepreneurship close to if not following chapter two Design thinking.

I also thought some of the chapters were very light on explanation for terms and concepts. An example of this comment is reflected in Chapter 2 Opportunity recognition and Design Thinking. There is only a paragraph or two that tries to explain Design Thinking. Even though Design Thinking is a very lengthy concept with many steps if I was a student I would be asking for more relevancy of the concept and perhaps even some examples.

I also note throughout the text that there are papers cited by Baron and Karatko who I find very reliable and credible resources in the area of entrepreneurship. I might use this text in my foundation of entrepreneurship class and would more than likely move Business Models chapter 4 more toward the end of the 10 chapters. I could then use as a capstone project building on the previous topics.

There are ten chapters presented and the content fits neatly into the titles. The traditional 15 week semester would be better served with perhaps chapters and the depth of content being much more granular.

Approach the content with the goal to engage and draw in the students through asking them to use experiential activities to demonstrate the theory and content.

I might also suggest adding graphics with more either color or shape to better explain the tools. I thought there could be better explanations of some of the tools. Consider this could be used as an entry level text and the student may have little knowledge of terms in the early part of the semester.

Terms, concepts and theory needs a laddering process in order to scaffold and build a students schema in the principles of entrepreneurship. This topic has been covered in my previous remarks that would be reviewed as the consideration of restructuring the chapters might provide a better experience for the students.

I thought the text could use more color, definition or utilization of graphics to get the tools, charts and graphs to stand out. Suggested previously that the use of headers with larger font, or additional colors could enhance the readers experience. I could not find any inconstancy in use of concepts that both audiences might understand. Various stages, roles in the entrepreneurial process. Entrepreneurship in India and barriers to entrepreneurship in India.

Understanding the feasibility of business opportunity. The meaning of project, identification, selection, reporting. The need for the project report and the significance of the project report, and so on. Definition, characteristics, and advantages of micro and small enterprises. Each window shows some features that can also be seen from the window on either side of it.

But the view from the center of each is distinct and different. The seven sources require separate analysis, for each has its own distinct characteristic.

No area is, however, inherently more important or more productive than the other. Major innovations are as likely to come out of an analysis of symptoms of change such as the unex- pected success of what was considered an insignificant change in product or pricing as they are to come out of the massive application of new knowledge resulting from a great scientific breakthrough.

But the order in which these sources will be discussed is not arbi- trary. They are listed in descending order of reliability and pre- dictability. For, contrary to almost universal belief, new knowledge— and especially new scientific knowledge—is not the most reliable or most predictable source of successful innovations.

For all the visibil- ity, glamour, and importance of science-based innovation, it is actu- ally the least reliable and least predictable one.

Conversely, the mun- dane and unglamorous analysis of such symptoms of underlying changes as the unexpected success or the unexpected failure carry fairly low risk and uncertainty. And the innovations arising therefrom have, typically, the shortest lead time between the start of a venture and its measurable results, whether success or failure.

In no other area are innovative opportu- nities less risky and their pursuit less arduous. Yet the unexpected suc- cess is almost totally neglected; worse, managements tend actively to reject it. Here is one example. Appliance sales have grown so fast that they now account for three-fifths.

The only thing left now is to push appliance sales down to where they should be. It realized that something unexpected was happening and analyzed it. It then built a new position in the marketplace around its Housewares Department. It also refocused its fashion and apparel sales to reach a new customer: the customer of whose emergence the explosion in appliance sales was only a symptom.

But the only uncommon aspect about it is that the chairman was aware of what he was doing. It is never easy for a management to accept the unexpected success. This explains, for instance, why one of the major U. It also knew that it could not obtain the necessary sums. It soon began to grow rapidly and to generate cash and profits. Top management people in most organizations, whether small or large, public-service institution or business, have typically grown up in one function or one area.

To them, this is the area in which they feel comfortable. When I sat down with the chairman of R. Macy, for instance, there was only one member of top management, the per- sonnel vice-president, who had not started as a fashion buyer and made his career in the fashion end of the business.

Appliances, to these men, were something that other people dealt with. The unexpected success can be galling. But nobody expects it to sell; in fact, nobody wants it to sell. Everybody is likely to react precisely the way the chairman of R. Macy reacted when he saw the unwanted and unloved appliances over- take his beloved fashions, on which he himself had spent his working life and his energy.

Managements are paid for their judgment, but they are not being paid to be infallible. In fact, they are being paid to realize and admit that they have been wrong— especially when their admission opens up an opportunity. But this is by no means common. A Swiss pharmaceutical company today has world leadership in veterinary medicines, yet it has not itself developed a single veteri- nary drug.

But the companies that developed these medicines refused to serve the veterinary market. The medicines, mostly antibiotics, were of course developed for treating human diseases. When the veterinarians discovered that they were just as effective for animals and began to send in their orders, the original manufac- turers were far from pleased. In some cases they refused to supply the veterinarians; in many others, they disliked having to reformu- late the drugs for animal use, to repackage them, and so on.

Some of the manufacturers were only too happy to get rid of the embarrassing success. Human medications have since come under price pressure and are carefully scrutinized by regulatory authorities. This has made veteri- nary medications the most profitable segment of the pharmaceutical industry. But the companies that developed the compounds in the first place are not the ones who get these profits. Nobody pays any attention to it.

Hence, nobody exploits it, with the inevitable result that the competitor runs with it and reaps the rewards. A leading hospital supplier introduced a new line of instruments for biological and clinical tests. The new products were doing quite well. Then, suddenly, orders came in from industrial and university laboratories. Nobody was told about them, nobody noticed them; nobody realized that, by pure accident, the company had developed products with more and better customers outside the market for which those products had been developed.

No salesman was being sent out to call on these new customers, no service force was being set up. Five or eight years later, another company had taken over these new markets.

And because of the volume of business these markets produced, the newcomer could soon invade the hospital market offer- ing lower prices and better services than the original market leader. Practically every company—but every public-service institution as well—has a monthly or quarterly report. The first sheet lists the areas in which performance is below expectations: it lists the prob- lems and the shortfalls.

At the monthly meetings of the management group and the board of directors, everybody therefore focuses on the problem areas. No one even looks at the areas where the company has done better than expected.

To exploit the opportunity for innovation offered by unex- pected success requires analysis. Unexpected success is a symp- tom. But a symptom of what? The underlying phenomenon may be nothing more than a limitation on our own vision, knowledge, and understanding.

The unexpected success of appliances at R. Up until World War II, department store consumers in the United States bought primarily by socioeconomic status, that is, by income group.

The unexpected success of laboratory instruments designed for the hospital in industrial and university laboratories was a symptom of the disappearance of distinctions between the various users of scientific instruments, which for almost a century had created sharply different markets, with different end uses, specifications, and expectations. What it symptomized—and the company never realized this—was not just that a product line had uses that were not originally envisaged. It sig- naled the end of the specific market niche the company had enjoyed in the hospital market.

So the company that for thirty or forty years had successfully defined itself as a designer, maker, and marketer of hospi- tal laboratory equipment was forced eventually to redefine itself as a maker of laboratory instruments, and to develop capabilities to design, manufacture, distribute, and service way beyond its original field. By then, however, it had lost a large part of the market for good. Thus the unexpected success is not just an opportunity for inno- valion; it demands innovation.

It forces us to ask, What basic changes are now appropriate for this organization in the way it defines its busi- ness? Its technology? Its markets? If these questions are faced up to, then the unexpected success is likely to open up the most rewarding and least risky of all innovative opportunities.

DuPont, for years, had confined itself to making munitions and explosives. In the mids it then organized its first research efforts in other areas, one of them the brand-new field of polymer chemistry, which the Germans had pioneered during World War I.

Then, in , an assistant left a burner on over the weekend. On Monday morning, Wallace H. Carothers, the chemist in charge, found that the stuff in the kettle had congealed into fibers. It took another ten years before DuPont found out how to make Nylon intentionally. The point of the story is, how- ever, that the same accident had occurred several times in the labora- tories of the big German chemical companies with the same results, and much earlier. The Germans were, of course, looking for a poly- merized fiber—and they could have had it, along with world leader- ship in the chemical industry, ten years before DuPont had Nylon.

But because they had not planned the experiment, they dismissed its results, poured out the accidentally produced fibers, and started all over again. The history of IBM equally shows what paying attention to the unexpected success can do.

For IBM is largely the result of the will- ingness to exploit the unexpected success not once, but twice. In the early s, IBM almost went under. It had spent its available money on designing the first electro-mechanical bookkeeping machine, meant for banks. But American banks did not buy new equipment in the Depression days of the early thirties.

IBM even then had a policy of not laying off people, so it continued to manufacture the machines, which it had to put in storage. Watson of IBM? Why does your sales manager refuse to demonstrate your machine to me? But next morning, he appeared there as soon as its doors opened. In those days, libraries had fair amounts of government money.

Like the other early American computers, the IBM computer was designed for scientific purposes only. But IBM, though equally surprised by the business demand for computers, responded immediately. Indeed, it was willing to sac- rifice its own computer design, which was not particularly suitable for accounting, and instead use what its rival and competitor Univac had developed. Within four years IBM had attained leadership in the computer market, even though for another decade its own computers were technically inferior to those produced by Univac.

Matsushita was a fairly small and undistinguished company in the early s, outranked on every count by such older and deeply entrenched giants as Toshiba or Hitachi. Matsushita, however, was intelligent enough to accept that the Japanese farmers apparently did not know that they were too poor for television.

What they knew was that television offered them, for the first time, access to a big world. They could not afford televi- sion sets, but they were prepared to buy them anyhow and pay for them. Toshiba and Hitachi made better sets at the time, only they showed them on the Ginza in Tokyo and in the big-city department stores, making it pretty clear that farmers were not particularly wel- come in such elegant surroundings. Matsushita went to the farmers and sold its televisions door-to-door, something no one in Japan had ever done before for anything more expensive than cotton pants or aprons.

The search has to be organized. It must be properly featured in the information management obtains and studies. How to do this is described in some detail in Chapter Managements must look at every unexpected success with the questions: 1 What would it mean to us if we exploited it?

And 4 How do we go about it? This means, first, that managements need to set aside specific time in which to discuss unexpected successes; and second, that someone should always be designated to analyze an unexpected success and to think through how it could be exploited.

But management also needs to learn what the unexpected success demands of them. Again, this might best be explained by an example. Nobody on the faculty really believed in the program. The only reason it was offered at all was that a small number of returning World War II veterans had been forced to go to work before obtain- ing their undergraduate degrees and were clamoring for an oppor- tunity to get the credits they still lacked.

And the students in the pro- gram actually outperformed the regular undergraduates. This, in turn, created a dilemma. To exploit the unexpected success, the university would have had to build a fairly big first-rate faculty.

But this would have weakened its main program; at the least, it would have diverted the university from what it saw as its main mission, the training of undergraduates. The alternative was to close down the new program. Either decision would have been a responsible one.

Instead, the university decided to staff the pro- gram with cheap, temporary faculty, mostly teaching assistants working on their own advanced degrees. As a result, it destroyed the program within a few years; but worse, it also seriously dam- aged its own reputation. The unexpected success is an opportunity, but it makes demands.

It demands to be staffed with the ablest people available, rather than with whoever we can spare. It demands seriousness and support on the part of management equal to the size of the opportunity.

And the opportunity is considerable. But they are seldom seen as symptoms of opportunity. A good many failures are, of course, nothing but mistakes, the results of greed, stupidity, thoughtless bandwagon-climbing, or incompetence whether in design or execution. Yet if something fails despite being carefully planned, carefully designed, and conscientiously executed, that failure often bespeaks underlying change and, with it, opportunity. The assumptions on which a product or service, its design or its marketing strategy, were based may no longer fit reality.

Any change like this is an opportunity for innovation. I had my first experience with an unexpected failure at the very begin- ning of my working life, almost sixty years ago, just out of high school. My first job was as a trainee in an old export firm, which for more than a century had been selling hardware to British India. Its best seller for years had been a cheap padlock, of which it exported whole shiploads every month.

The padlock was flimsy; a pin easily opened the lock. As incomes in India went up during the s, padlock sales, instead of going up, began to decline quite sharply.

But the improved padlock turned out to be unsalable. Four years later, the firm went into liquidation, the decline of its Indian padlock business a major factor in its demise. For the bulk of Indians, the peasants in the villages, the padlock was and for all I know, still is a magical symbol; no thief would have dared open a padlock. The key was never used, and usual- ly disappeared.

To get a padlock that could not easily be opened with- out a key—the improved padlock my employer had worked so hard to perfect without additional cost—was thus not a boon but a disaster. A small but rapidly growing middle-class minority in the cities, however, needed a real lock. That it was not sturdy enough for their needs was the main reason why the old lock had begun to lose sales and market.

But for them the redesigned product was still inadequate. Both lines immediately began to sell. Within two years, the competitor had become the largest European hardware exporter to India.

A quaint tale from horse and buggy days, some might say. Surely we have become more sophisticated in this age of computers, of mar- ket research, and of business school MBAs. Yet it teaches exactly the same lesson. Inflation was becoming rampant, particularly in housing prices, which rose much faster than anything else. At the same time, interest rates on home mortgages were skyrocketing. The builders tried to salvage it by offering low-interest financing and long repayment terms, and by slashing prices.

He found that there had been a change in what the young American couple wants in its first house. To make the down payment on this far more expensive permanent home, they would, however, need the equity they had built up in the first house. Seniority, for working-class people with Japan being the major exception , means greater job security rather than larger incomes. Once this was understood—and all it took was to listen to prospective homebuyers for a few weekends—successful innovation came about eas- ily.

Almost no change was made in the physical plant itself; only the kitchen was redesigned and made somewhat roomier. Five years later, the firm was operating in seven metropolitan areas and was either number one or a strong number two in each of them. Even during the building recession of —82—a recession so severe that some of the largest American builders did not sell one sin- gle new house during an entire season—this innovative homebuilder continued to grow.

It gave us a steady supply of well-built and still fairly new houses that needed only a little fixing up and could then be resold at a very decent profit to the next crop of first-home buyers. The unexpected failure demands that you go out, look around, and listen. Failure should always be considered a symp- tom of an innovative opportunity, and taken seriously as such. At that time Kroc was selling milkshake machines to hamburger joints. He investigated and found an old man who had, in effect, reinvented the fast-food business by system- atizing it.

In either case, one takes the event seriously as a possible symptom of innovative opportunity. Innovation—and this is a main thesis of this book—is organized, systematic, rational work. But it is perceptual fully as much as con- ceptual. To be sure, what the innovator sees and learns has to be sub- jected to rigorous logical analysis. It is not in fact even necessary for the entrepreneur to understand why reality has changed. In the two cases above, it was easy to find out what had happened and why.

More often, we find out what is hap- pening without much clue as to why. And yet we can still innovate successfully. Even people who were not yet born when the Edsel failed have heard about it, at least in the United States. But the general belief that the Edsel was a slapdash gamble is totally mis- taken. Very few products were ever more carefully designed, more care- fully introduced, more skillfully marketed.

Ford went to extreme lengths to plan and design the Edsel, embodying in its design the best information from market research, the best information about customer preferences in appearance and styling, and the highest standards of quality control. Yet the Edsel became a total failure right away. The reaction of the Ford Motor Company was very revealing.

All we know is that something happened. But that is enough to convert the unexpected, whether success or failure, into an opportunity for effective and purposeful innovation. But outside events, that is, events that are not recorded in the information and the figures by which a management steers its institution, are just as important. Indeed, they often are more important. Here are some examples showing typical unexpected outside events and their exploitation as major opportunities for successful innovation.

One example concerns IBM and the personal computer. Everything else, every IBM engineer could prove convincingly, would be far too expensive, far too confusing, and far too limited in its performance capacity. And so IBM concentrated its efforts and resources on main- taining its leadership in the main-frame market.

Right away their fathers wanted their own office computer or personal computer, that is, a separate, small, freestanding machine with far less capacity than even the smallest main-frame has. All the dire things the IBM people had predicted actually did happen.

But this does not seem to bother the customers. On the contrary, in the U. IBM could have been expected to dismiss this development. As a result, IBM produced its own personal computer in , just when the market was exploding. But is it no less instruc- tive despite its lack of glamour. The United States has never been a book-buying country, in part because of the ubiquitous free public library. But instead of collapsing, book sales in the United States have soared since TV first came in.

No one knows why this happened. Indeed, no one quite knows what really happened. Books are still as rare in the typical American home as before. That we have no answer to this question does not alter the fact that books are being bought and paid for in increasing numbers. Both the publishers and the existing bookstores knew, of course, all along that book sales were soaring.

Neither, however, did anything about it. The unexpected event was exploited, instead, by a few mass retailers such as department stores in Minneapolis and Los Angeles. None of these people had ever had anything to do with books, but they knew the retail business. They started bookstore chains that are quite different from any earlier bookstore in America. Basically, these are supermarkets. They are located in shopping centers with high rents but also with high traffic, whereas everybody in the book business had known all along that a bookstore has to be in a low-rent location, preferably near a universi- ty.

The standing joke among them is that any salesperson who wants to read anything besides the price tag on the book is hopelessly overqualified. For ten years now, these new bookstore chains have been among the most successful and fastest-growing segments in American retail- ing and among the fastest-growing new businesses in this country altogether.

Each of these cases represents genuine innovation. But not one of them represents diversification. IBM stayed in the computer business. Companies, even large companies, that went into the new book market This is also true of Japan, the country, that per capita, buys more books than any other and twice as many as the United States.

Yet as the above examples show, it also demands innovation in product and often in service and distribution channels. The second point about these cases is that they all are big-com- pany cases. Of course, a good many of the cases in this book, as in any management book, have to be big-company cases. They are the only available ones, as a rule, the only ones that can be found in the published records, the only ones discussed on the business page of newspapers or in magazines.

Small-company cases are much harder to come by and often cannot be discussed without violating confidences. But exploiting the unexpected outside event appears to be some- thing that particularly fits the existing enterprise, and a fairly sizable one at that. I know of few small companies that have successfully exploited the unexpected outside event; nor does any other student of entrepreneurship and innovation whom I could consult. This may be coincidence. The large retailer also knows about shopping-center locations and how to get the good ones.

And could a small company have done what IBM did and detach four task forces of first-rate designers and engineers to work on new product lines? Smaller high-tech compa- nies in a rapidly growing industry usually do not have enough of such people even for their existing work. It may well be that the unexpected outside event is the innovative area that offers the large enterprise the greatest opportunity along with the lowest risk.

It may be the area that is particularly suited for innovation by the large and established enterprise. It may be the area in which expertise matters the most, and in which the ability to mobi- lize substantial resources fast makes the greatest difference.

But as these cases also show, being big and established does not guarantee that an enterprise will perceive the unexpected event and successfully organize itself to exploit it. Not one of them exploited the personal computer—they were all too busy fighting IBM. The opportunity is there, in other words.

It is a major opportunity, occurring frequently. And when it occurs, it holds out great promise, particularly for existing and sizable enterprises. But such opportuni- ties require more than mere luck or intuition. They demand that the enterprise search for innovation, be organized for it, and be managed so as to exploit it.

We may not understand the reason for it; indeed, we often cannot figure it out. Still, an incongruity is a symptom of an opportu- nity to innovate.