Greetings, and welcome to Session 1 of Technology Entrepreneurship. My name is Dr. John Thomas and I'm a scholar in residence at University of Colorado in Boulder. We're going to go through entrepreneurship from a technology perspective and begin to understand what are some of the core issues, but really what is the core meaning. Initially, what do we understand by the words entrepreneur and entrepreneurship? Let me go ahead and share my screen and see if I can get us in here. There's the PowerPoint and I'll do share. We're going to talk about entrepreneurship and, in particular, what are some of the myths? Oftentimes, we begin a new adventure or begin thinking about exploring something new and there are myths or hindrances that get on our way and we'd like to address some of those things right up front. Also, we'd like to understand how the society benefit from entrepreneurship and to begin introducing the concept of entrepreneurial thinking. What do you exactly does that mean? What is an entrepreneurial mindset? What motivates us to go out and create new businesses and new products and services? Let's go ahead and jump in. The real question here, what is entrepreneurship? But we're also asking, what is technology entrepreneurship? Well, we can approach it from a couple of different ways. First, let's be clear what an entrepreneur is. Well, it's a person who creates or forms or operates a new business. Now, the emphasis here being new. Well, sometimes the business may not be new. In fact, there may be a condition whereby someone has acquired a small business and it's already operating. Of course, they're in an entrepreneurial mindset and behavior and operating very much like an entrepreneurial company. While, generally, we think of an entrepreneur to be someone who creates a new business, it's not necessarily the case. We could acquire business or we could join an existing business that is already operating entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurs create value. Now, what we're going to suggest in this course is to recognize that the very concept of value has multiple dimensions. Historically, we have focused on economic value. But what we've begun to recognize is value refers there's also social value and there's environmental value. In fact, there may be multiple different ways to think about what value means, but we want to encourage you to extend the concept of value a bit beyond economics and to recognize there are other impressions that entrepreneurs make an impact that have contributions to society and to our natural environment in addition to economics. More and more individuals are taking all of these into consideration with regard to creating value and starting new companies. Typically, an entrepreneur will bear substantial risk there and on the early formation of the company. In this regard, they take incredible risk, sometimes perhaps investing their own money, but the benefits are that they are in a position to reap the rewards. Risk reward, as we learned in finance, the greater risk, typically a greater reward. The rewards for entrepreneurs can be substantial. Entrepreneurship, well, one way to think of entrepreneurship once we have a general understanding of an entrepreneur, it's an alternative way of seeing the world, a different way of looking at and interpreting information. Oftentimes, we lead with curiosity and we strive to understand the underlying structures of a particular situation or circumstance or perhaps a technology, and how it may apply to render support or service, or perhaps solve a problem. It's a different way of thinking, a different way of looking at the world. It's a mindset. It's an attitude that we bring to a particular situation. On the one hand, we may reach an impasse and think, oh, we need a solution, let's go find a solution, or we look at that and we discover how to move in and through the challenges that are before us. An entrepreneur brings a particular mindset, a particular way of interpreting information to strive to extract value. As such, it's a set of methods, practices, and processes. Now, some authors in entrepreneurship may want to emphasize, oh, it's only methods, it's not really a process, or it's actually a process, it's not really a method. Well, I say yes and yes. I believe it's a mix of all of them and especially when we're thinking about technology entrepreneurship. Oftentimes, there are processes involved in creating materials and deriving solutions to problems, applying those materials and configuring them in particular ways. But what we want to emphasize here is that there are distinct steps. There are particular methods that can be followed. There are practices that can be engaged and processes that may be employed that support entrepreneurship and help guide toward the intended outcomes. Technology entrepreneurship. Now let's try to focus a little bit more. Well, technology entrepreneurship strives to harvest scientific knowledge to create value. Scientific knowledge, and recall, scientific knowledge is based on observation, experimentation, validation. Essentially, when we find ways to bring new products and services based on scientific knowledge grounded in observation and experimentation, it's what we think of as technology entrepreneurship. The results are the creation of objects, and devices, and artifacts. It may also include operating methods and tools and even procedures. Technology entrepreneurship is about harnessing what we have gathered or apprehended as knowledge, and then configuring it in a particular way or presenting, or rearranging, or creating a device or a solution that solves or addresses a particular need or problem. Technology entrepreneurship is going to be the focus of our course, and what we'll find is that many of the aspects of entrepreneurship, actually, of technology entrepreneurship apply across the board. Doesn't matter if it's technology, or commercial, or any of the different variety of different types of entrepreneurship that we may conceive of, but we're going to be a little more focused on technology and will strive to highlight those special circumstances and conditions as they arise. That completes Video 1. I'll go ahead and, let's see, stop sharing, and that will end Video 1 of 7. We'll see you again soon. Cheers.
