Personal Entrepreneurial
Characteristics
Workshop 3
“ memihkar lemeizam”
24 June 2008
Uzi de Haan co-developed with Mia Erez
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Entrepreneurial Characteristics
Fundamental Research Questions (Baron, 2002)
• How and why do some people, but not others,
recognize opportunities
• How and why do some people, but not others,
decide to become (a) an entrepreneur, (b) start new
ventures, and (c) exploit opportunities
• How and why do some people, but not others,
organize new ventures that grow rapidly and are
successful or become life-style entrepreneurs or
intrapreneurs
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Entrepreneurial Characteristics
• Are you born with them or can they be learned?
• Can you assess/measure them and use this for
recruitment and decision to invest
• Can teams complement the entrepreneurial traits and
abilities needed
• To which degree are entrepreneurship characteristics
contextual. E.g. in certain environments, organizational
cultures individuals are entrepreneurial and in others
not
• Are there thresholds values for essential
entrepreneurial characteristics above which, context
determines entrepreneurial action. E.g. Chinese and
Indians in Silicon Valley, Russian immigrants in Israel,
laid off employees
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Essential conditions for success
and attracting investment
High Growth
Market
$100M+
Exit
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Unique
Technology/
Products
Workshop BEIC-TT-2008
The Founder
The Team
To team or go to on your own
Advantages of teaming:
• Complementary skills
• Risk reduction
• Emotional support
• Can be part-time for some team members e.g. faculty members
• Investors like teams
• Success rates of founders teams of start-up companies
•Disadvantages of teaming
• Dilution of ownership
• Conflicts in team
• Inequalities in responsibilities
• Changes in roles and composition of team difficult to manage
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Entrepreneurial Roles and Involvement of
University Researchers in Technology Transfer
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CEO of Spin-Off
(part-time) member of founder’s team
consultant of the spin-off or licensee
Level of
Involvement
consultant during the Technology Transfer Process
Support of TT Office in communication with licensees
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0
Invention disclosure to TT Office/ ISKIT
No involvement, only publications
Roles
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Research on the characteristics of
entrepreneurs and innovators
•
Despite extensive research and research hypotheses little conclusive evidence of relations
between personality and other characteristics and intention to be entrepreneur or
entrepreneurial performance.
•
Variables with an impact are:
- Need for achievement
- Need for autonomy
- Personal Initiative
- Self confidence
- Open to experiments, innovativeness
- Tenacity and endurance
- Incremental Innovator
- Breakthrough innovator
- Passion
- Creativity
- Risk-taking
- Conformity
- Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy
- Employment status, education, married, experience, age, social
ties
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Workshop BEIC-TT-2008
Research on the characteristics of
entrepreneurs and innovators as predictor for
entrepreneurial intention and performance
•
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- Need for achievement
- Need for autonomy
- Personal Initiative
- Self confidence
- Open to experiments, innovativeness
- Tenacity and endurance
- Incremental Innovator
- Breakthrough innovator
- Passion
- Risk-taking
- Conformity
- Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy
- Employment status, education, married, experience, age, social
ties
- Entrepreneurial Experience
Workshop BEIC-TT-2008
Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy
• Motivational construct of self-efficacy and situational selfefficacy is developed by Bandura, 1986
• Self-efficacy is the belief in one’s ability to muster and
implement the necessary personal resources, skills and
competencies to attain a certain level of achievement on a
given task (Bandura, 1997)
• Self-efficacy can be seen as task-specific self-confidence
and has been shown to be a robust predictor of individual
task performance
• Entrepreneurial self-efficacy concerns entrepreneurship
related tasks and will influence entrepreneurial intentions
• Self-efficacy is changeable amongst others by learning
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Dr. Michael Kirton’s
Kirton Adaption/Innovation Inventory
Outgrowth of British government study
Measures STYLE of creativity, NOT amount
Facet of who you are as a person
First published in 1976 by Dr. Kirton
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Your Creativity Style
• An inborn Orientation, it’s not a
choice; you cannot change it.
• Part of who you happen to be.
• Observable very early in life.
• Stable over time.
• Independent of age, education,
birth order, gender, culture.
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Creativity Style Continuum
Perfects the
system
(incremental)
#
96
Changes the
system
(radical)
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160
KAI Continuum
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“My first impulse on taking any
apparatus into my hand…, is to
seek a way of improving it.”
“I have never worked on anything
that didn’t already have a
working model.”
-Thomas Edison
With 1093 patents to his credit, HOW was
Thomas Edison creative?
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“Imagination is more
Important than
knowledge.”
“If we knew what we were
doing it wouldn’t be called
research would it?”
-Albert Einstein
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HOW was Albert Einstein Creative?
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Differences in Style
96
Edison
Einstein
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160
Continuum
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Research on the characteristics of
entrepreneurs and innovators as predictor for
entrepreneurial intention and performance
• - Need for achievement
- Need for autonomy
- Personal Initiative
- Self confidence
- Open to experiments, innovativeness
- Tenacity and endurance
- Incremental Innovator
- Breakthrough innovator
- Passion
- Risk-taking
- Conformity
- Entrepreneurial Self-Efficacy
- Employment status, education, married, experience, age, social
ties
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Exercise with short questionnaire
Please complete and calculate average scores on
variables
• Entrepreneurial Experience Q 1-2 Score between 0-2
• Entrepreneurial Self-efficacy Q3- 10 Score between 1-5
• Personal Initiative Q11-13 Score between 1-7
• Incremental innovation Q14-17 Score between 1-7
• Entrepreneurial intention Q18 Score 1-5
• Radical Innovation Q19-21 Score 1-7
• Risk-taking Q22-23 Score 1-7
Discuss results
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