Entrepreneurship experience in relation to the lecture

Entrepreneurship and Innovation



To fully attune my self to this blog, I will firstly relate the lecture to my personal experience, and later define the meanings of entrepreneurship and innovation within the context of some scholars and how I personally understand it.

The lecture as a whole was really good and at the end of it all, I was fully engulfed with confidence that we are going to have wonderful study periods on this program. As a point of note, I would like to say that whenever something new or a new situation comes up, there are always bigger percentages of respondents in panic and confusion. But in this case, the very opposite quickly struck me, and found my self in a very familiar situation— easy adaptation. Although different people may have different thoughts upon such a new situation, I would like to argue that I was impressed by the overall organization of the lecture due to the fact that not only did it contain top of the range knowledge material, but the tutor was also very professional and knowledgeable about the various issues that were discussed. That being said, I was therefore not surprised at all because the quality of teaching struck to the right side of my imagination.

According to my personal experience, all that was discussed in the lecture really makes sense to me due to the fact that becoming an entrepreneur or innovator is something that would require some personal determination, sacrifices, time dedication and risk of the available/ limited resources.

My personal experience is dated a few years back as a 2nd year student in my home country. During these challenging times, I came up with an idea of opening up a mobile telephone service that was aimed at targeting customers who did not have the money to own a mobile phone. The idea came to me after I had finished one of the lectures in marketing. As one of the few students that owned a mobile phone in the class, I usually found my self being surrounded by fellow students who badly needed to borrow my mobile phone to make calls to their loved ones. After such an incident, I discovered that there was need to do something different for those who were in dire need of telephone services. The evaluation therefore came down to deciding between three variables:

a) Economic gains; it surely looked possible that I would make a lot of money from the limited resource that was available (mobile phone).
b) Location; I decided that the most favourable location would be near the campus gate, in order to attract both students and the locals.
c) Price; since I was liable to paying the fixed monthly telephone cost, all I had to do was to charge reasonable extra money off every minute of the variable air time.

I therefore grabbed the opportunity to extend this needed service bearing in mind that since there were not many other competitors around, I would have a huge number of customers who viewed a mobile telephone as a very expensive device.

My personal views are hence in harmony with Shane and Venkataraman (2000), who opine that entrepreneurship is defined as the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to create future goods and services. The authors clarify that in order for one to be termed as an entrepreneur, one has to posses the best qualities of finding out, and thoroughly taking advantage of the available opportunities for the sake of creating goods and services. In that sense therefore, I became a remarkable innovator in the manner that there was an opportunity for business creation that was created.

The lecture further makes sense to me in a way that as an entrepreneur, the onus was fully upon me to market the service and attract more customers. As such a small business grew bigger due to the extended information techniques and marketing, it became clear that the value for innovation was visible.

References

“The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research” Shane, S and Venkataraman, S; 2000.