What’s all the fuss about entrepreneurship?!

Entrepreneur is admittedly not an easy word to spell – for the first few attempts, many may miss out an ‘o’ or add the odd ‘u’…

Putting the spelling of the word aside for a minute though, what does being an entrepreneur actually mean?

Entrepreneurship is a mindset that can be adopted and a behaviour that can be taught and learnt (especially well through doing) – the myth of entrepreneurs being ‘born not made´ has been largely shown to be the exception, rather than the rule. This is encouraging because there is therefore hope for us all!

Intrepreneurship (no, that’s not a misspelling!)

Entrepreneurship is not limited to starting a new company of your own initiative, own financial backing etc – you can act and be an entrepreneur within an established company, such as Google, Cisco and the engineering consulting giant ARUP to name but a few, earning a good salary and gaining the satisfaction that your creative efforts are being truly realised and making a difference. Working in such an environment is fun and rewarding. Being an entrepreneur of this kind is called intrapreneurship – thankfully there is an entrepreneurial path for everyone!

Quite simply (!), one definition of entrepreneurship is:

‘The process of creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial… and social risks, and receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence.’

The beauty of the above definition is that it lays out all the key points we wish to cover in this short piece – yes short; we want people to be inspired by reading this and not have that ‘heavy-headed’ sleepiness you get after emerging from a long lecture!

Time for a sentence dissection…

‘…creating something new…’

• The word ‘newness’ is understood by different people in different ways – it’s impossible to have absolute knowledge of every concept/industry sector/ field of study etc out there in the world, so what may at first appear to be new to one person may in fact be knowledge taken for granted by another person.
  

   

• Think about your own subject specialities – if you were a biologist say, would you know all the latest developments in the internet space (ignoring the case where the biologist has an outside interest in the internet of course!). Likewise, would the computing student be expected to know about the latest in RNAi research? Exactly!

  In short, if you are working within a particular field of study and are familiar with the space and see an opportunity to improve a process or do something that hasn’t been done before, you are one step on the entrepreneurial path.

   

• Of course, thinking and actually doing are completely different things – the transition from one to the other involves some effort and commitment…

‘devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial… and social risks‘

• In economics, there’s the concept of ‘Risk and Reward‘ – in essence, the greater the risk of doing something, the greater the reward will be from its successful realisation.
  

• There’s no soft way to say this – entrepreneurial activities involve risk!
  

• Does this mean that if you are someone that hates risk (perfectly reasonable to be too!) you have to scrub entrepreneurship from you vocabulary list? Absolutely not!
  

• As mentioned earlier, entrepreneurship is not only limited to starting your own company from you own ideas and your own financial backing etc – people that do all the aforementioned groundwork need talented people to work for them in their start-up. These people could be you! – We get loads of requests from start-ups looking for Imperial graduates. You’d work for a highly competitive salary whilst being able to indulge in your creative side as well – everyone has a creative side and their own ideas, it just takes the right kind of environment to allow them to flourish.
  

• Another myth about entrepreneurship is that it takes up your whole life – whilst we won’t deny that being an entrepreneur is time-consuming, if you want the high rewards, this invariably takes effort. The same argument could be levelled at any industry – would investment bankers earn as much if it weren’t for the 16-18 hour days? Probably not.
  

• The difference with entrepreneurship though is that you are doing your ‘job’ because you love it and want to create social and global value (notice we didn’t say wealth, which is different…).
  

• It eventually gets to a stage where work ceases to feel like work anymore and you don’t think about the time that has passed because you’re working for the sheer love of it – believe it or not, this is not a romantic notion! Once you experience it, you realise that it’s real and tres cool, hence why we are trying to spread the love with Imperial Entrepreneurs.
  

‘…receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence.’

• Finally, the sweet rewards.
  
• Rewards is a subjective matter and depends very much on the individual - for some, money may be the dominant driving force, for others such as social-enterprise and not-for-profit company founders, personal satisfaction may top their list. For others still, it may be complete financial and corporate commitment independence.
  
• Usually it’s a combination of all three, with individual importance attached to each, again, dependent on the individual.
  

Whilst you’re thinking about the next stage in your life we urge you to consider what motivates you in terms of rewards. Is it mainly money? Personal satisfaction? Independence?

By being an entrepreneur, you have a chance to balance these desired outcomes like in no other career, whether you’re starting from absolutely nothing or deciding whether to be an ‘intrapreneur’ working within a large company. Remember, entrepreneurship is a fluid process and just because you start a company, join a start-up or take an entrepreneurial mindset to a corporate job today doesn’t mean that you’ll be there for the rest of your life! Entrepreneurs make the bulk of their money on ‘exit’ such as the sale of the company, so there’s always to opportunity to go off and do something new and exciting!

Finally, Imperial Entrepreneurs is here to help you familiarise yourselves with the entrepreneurial process and build up a contacts network during your studies, so that by the time you graduate, you are in a strong position to go out into the world and succeed as talented Imperial Alumni.

A little something to get you going:

Hisrich, R.D., Peters, M., Shepher, D. (2008). Entrepreneurship. 7^th Ed. McGraw-Hill, Singapore.

On the December 4 2007, we have a special guest coming all the way from California to take your questions at The Garage Special - Q & A with Paul Graham.

Paul’s biography is on our main page and just reading it it’s clear that he has done some pretty amazing things.

I urge you to spend some time looking through the essays he’s written on his website - www.paulgraham.com - they provide some truly fascinating insights and even if you’re not into programming, there’s a broad range of material for everyone to enjoy. Incidentally, Paul’s views on a lot of things align with my thoughts exactly - I look forward to meeting him!

Now, if you have any questions that you’d like to ask Paul on the night, drop me a line at: henry@imperialentrepreneurs.com and I’ll post them up here.

Ciao!

Henry

UPDATE:

Please see below for the Intruders.tv interview with Paul after the event!

It’s been a few weeks since our Launch Event and, not content with just basking in the glory of its success , the IE team has been working hard to put together another high-grade event that our members will enjoy!

Kieran O’Neill and Sutha Kamal are our guests on the 6th November and they have great stories to tell from the perspective of a young entrepreneur, which should bear great relevance for the vast majority of our undergraduate and graduate students at Imperial and our external guests.

Please come and support us and our guests, offer feedback, network and get fast tracked on the entrepreneurship ladder! Also, thinking ahead to the main Entrepreneur’s Challenge event early next year, it’s worth finding great new team members with which to form a hopefully successful team - our Garage events are a one-top shot for business talent, so come along and see what you can find

The events page is on our Facebook page:

http://imperial.facebook.com/event.php?eid=5679722907

See you there!

H

Thanks to all of you that came to our launch event on Tueday, 23rd October. As I’m sure you’ll agree, we had a fantastic panel of speakers last night who offered us some great life-experiences and tips. Imperial Entrepreneurs (IE) intends to go from strength-to-strength, and best serve the needs of our members!

We will soon be offering an anonymous feedback form on our website that will allow you to let us know what you think in a few clicks and lines of text - your feedback is very important to us and will let us know how we are doing. Please also feel free to register and comment on this blog.

Intruders.tv recorded the event for us last night, so we will have that available shortly for anyone that missed the event or who wants to relive the experience

I just want to finish by reiterating something that Alex Hoye mentioned at the Launch, which was that entrepreneurship should be about having fun. The business of business itself is serious, but it’s important to enjoy what you’re doing. Find what you are passionate about and work doesn’t feel like work any longer. Make the best of every opportunity you have now - seize the moment, otherwise you risk looking back with regret. This life is as good as you decide to make it, and boy can it be very good indeed!

H