hello this is dr. Adam Jay Bach in this audio presentation we're going to talk about why entrepreneurship matters specifically we're going to begin the conversation by talking about the factors that lead people to become entrepreneurs so this map is from your textbook disciplined entrepreneurship and we're pretty much beginning prior to the actual map that's shown here with market segmentation by thinking about who we are understanding our own motivations and the factors that could lead any of us to become an entrepreneur is really the essential starting point prior to thinking about potential markets but I want you to have this map in your mind as you begin this process because this course will take you step-by-step through nearly all of the actual twenty-four steps in the disciplined entrepreneurship process it's important to recognize that this process this disciplined entrepreneurship framework is designed to help you think about whether an opportunity is attractive and if you decide to pursue it the steps to take in order to potentially bring an innovation to the market at the same time it's not about giving you a definitive answer for whether to be an entrepreneur or not you could go through this process and discover that an opportunity is not very attractive but that you still really want to work on commercializing it or you could go through this process and discover that an opportunity does seem pretty attractive but you're not personally interested those are both perfectly reasonable conclusions to reach and they hinge on this question of motivation and driving factors and that's why we begin the course by thinking about the entrepreneur as compared to the opportunity we want you to have the this time to think about whether this is something you're interested in and it's perfectly fine if you're not as well as how that relates to the specific like opportunities that you may or may not choose to pursue so this is a good time to open up the activity in canvas I strongly encourage you as you begin to go through all of these presentations to consider using multiple tabs or separate window if you're lucky enough to have two monitors of course you could simply put the presentation on one monitor and the activity and another obviously this is an online course and you are welcome to do the activities afterwards but you will get the most out of the activities and the best learning experience by doing these in process in parallel that's how they're designed to function and so the first piece of this activity is to think of someone that you know personally that you feel is entrepreneurial so I don't want you to pick someone like Steve Jobs or a Mon musk unless you you know you know people like that very personally obviously Steve Jobs you'd have to have known previously since he's passed and then I want you to identify that individual but it could be just a friend of the family or it could be a parent or it could be someone you know from school just identify their name and then what are the two or three key traits of that person you identified like what is it about them that makes you think that that causes you to think oh this is an entrepreneurial person so take a moment to do that and once you've done that then please continue on with this presentation so it's important to recognize the difference between what popular media tends to identify as entrepreneurial traits versus what the research actually shows much of popular media focuses on traits that really sound exciting but when you read through them you discover that they're they're kind of generic and they're often while some of them based are based on studies they're not usually based on scientific studies and they're very often simply based on anecdotal information like looking at a couple of entrepreneurs people like Elan musk or Mark Zuckerberg and saying okay well here's a great entrepreneur so here are this person's trait so those must be the traits that make people entrepreneurial and so here's an article for example from Entrepreneur Magazine which is a reasonably reputable source and I think there's all lots of interesting things there in which this particular author identifies the key traits of an entrepreneur as being passion motivation optimism creativity and risk-taking well this could be a skydiver right so we want to recognize that sometimes what's in the popular media is not always what the actual academic research the scientific research has shown and another key point to really remember is that the traits that lead people to become entrepreneurs may not be the same traits that help entrepreneurs succeed this is in part why we teach entrepreneurship because you may or may not be able to fully control or impact the things that could drive you to be an entrepreneur your financial situation certain motivations and so on and so forth but once you become an entrepreneur those same factors might not be the elements that cause you to succeed and those are the skills that we want to teach in the class so that if you decide to be entrepreneurial whether it's as a start-up founder or in a corporate environment or for a university or a government that you can be successful regardless of the underlying traits that you bring to the table so here are some of the traits that research has shown are associated with becoming entrepreneurial people who have higher self-esteem people who have a need for achievement and independence an intrinsic need not always driven from the outside but driven from the inside these folks tend to be good on learning aptitude tests on the other hand their GPA is not often siz not always stellar and you I'm sure heard the anecdotal stories about all of the top entrepreneurs who dropped out of college people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs in fact the research does not show that entrepreneurs are risk takers but it does show that they're comfortable with calculated risk taking in other words they often will look at situations and perform an analysis to think to themselves does this make sense to do they're not adrenaline junkies per se there is seem to be a link between innovativeness and creativity and entrepreneurial behavior and these individuals do tend to be optimist and there's one more element that's probably worth noting which is that these are usually people who feel as if they have some control over their lives we call this the locus of self control and it means that they believe that what they do makes a difference that if they make a choice that the outcome of that choice actually matters and this makes sense if you thought for example that success was based purely on luck then maybe you wouldn't bother being an entrepreneur it would make sense to take on an opportunity but if you believe that your actions can directly impact the outcome then clearly it makes sense to seriously consider being an entrepreneur but it's good to recognize that there's no one type of entrepreneur there's no single set of characteristics that are always present in a significant degree anyone in my I believe anyone can have an entrepreneurial mindset and I believe almost anyone can try being an entrepreneur as I mentioned these are not indicators of success these are indicators of whether you're likely to choose to become an entrepreneur there's also of long list of non trait drivers of entrepreneurship that is factors that tend to lead people to become entrepreneurs these include socioeconomic factors educational attainment national immigrant status nature vs. nurture and prior experience so we're gonna quickly walk through those there's many socio-economic drivers if you have high income you're less likely to be an entrepreneur which makes sense because you have a good job that pays well being unemployed tends to cause people to be entrepreneurs interestingly having wealth or your family having wealth actually leads you to be more likely to be an entrepreneur and this sort of makes that it might be not intuitive at first if you think well you have all this money why would you be an entrepreneur but actually having money gives you the freedom to explore options education is partly linked through entrepreneurship you'll notice that some survey results suggest that people who have some college or more of who have completed a college degree are more commonly entrepreneurs than others but none of this is not an indication that you can't be an entrepreneur unless you have an indication many many people only have a high school degree and many entrepreneurs have no high school degree at all so there is some link there but it is not a definitive link immigrant status however very significantly linked to entrepreneurial behavior this is something I really want to emphasize because there are sometimes suggestions that immigrants in the United States are a source of problems or linked to crime and the reality of the immigrant impact on on the American economy is unbelievably important immigrants are almost twice as likely to start businesses in the United States as native-born Americans and a significant number of high-growth tech companies have immigrant founders so you know we're all entitled to our own opinion about how the country should be run and about the role of America in global issues such as immigration and Asylum seeking and things like that but the facts are completely clear that immigrants have a significant and positive impact on the American economy and specifically in entrepreneurship nature vs. nurture is a really fascinating argument that's been taking place in the Entrepreneurship literature for many many years are people born entrepreneurs do they grow up as entrepreneurs and my there's extensive argument about this without a definitive conclusion the best guess we have right now is that they both matter some people seem to have traits that lead them to be entrepreneurial and some of those traits are hard to change on the other hand we know for a fact that people who grew up in families with entrepreneurial parents are more likely to be an entrepreneur and so there's clearly a nurture effect associated with the environment they grow up in and the experiences that they have so take a moment now to do the next activity in in canvas when was the last time that you behaved entrepreneurially what trader characteristics would you use to describe that behavior so here we want you to move on from thinking about someone else that you know and think about your own entrepreneurial activity and the odds are that you've been entrepreneurial in the last year or two I don't mean starting a company necessarily if you have obviously feel free to describe that but if you've created a new club in high school if you set up a Dungeons & Dragons group and got a bunch of your friends to play if you created a if you raised money for a charity any of these kinds of things are really entrepreneurial action so I encourage you to take a moment think about something and enter it into canvas the bottom line about entrepreneurship is that it's less about who you are and more about the actions you take if you went through the innovation marketplace activity you know that simply having an idea is not enough ideas do not commercialize themselves ultimately the definition of entrepreneurship that I like in which you see an opportunity and take action to create change is at the heart of what we want to talk about in this class because it's that taking action to create change that really distinguishes entrepreneurs from innovators so I hope that this helps you see a little bit about entrepreneurship and maybe a different light in particular how it might relate to your own prior experiences as well as what you might want to accomplish in the future