Entrepreneurial motivations

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From the course by University of Maryland, College Park

Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship

452 ratings

University of Maryland, College Park

Developing Innovative Ideas for New Companies: The First Step in Entrepreneurship

452 ratings

Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Entrepreneurship: Launching an Innovative Business

This course assists aspiring and active entrepreneurs in developing great ideas into great companies. With strong economies presenting rich opportunities for new venture creation, and challenging economic times presenting the necessity for many to make their own job, the need to develop the skills to develop and act on innovative business opportunities is increasingly vital. Using proven content, methods, and models for new venture opportunity assessment and analysis, you will learn how to: * Identify and analyze entrepreneurial opportunities; * Enhance your entrepreneurial mindset; * Improve your strategic decision-making; and * Build innovative business models. Our goal is to demystify the startup process, and to help you build the skills to identify and act on innovative opportunities now, and in the future. With this course, students experience a sampling of the ideas and techniques explored in the University of Maryland's master's degree in technology entrepreneurship, an innovative, 100% online program. Learn more at http://mte.umd.edu/landing.

From the lesson

Entrepreneurial Mindset, Motivations, and Behaviors

This module explores entrepreneurial thinking with attention to entrepreneurial mindset, entrepreneurial motivations, and entrepreneurial behaviors.

Entrepreneurial mindset9:02

Guest Lecture with Alexa von Tobel, Founder and CEO of LearnVest.com8:06

Entrepreneurial motivations7:53

Guest Lecture with Penny Pritzker, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker - How did you decide to become an entrepreneur?2:02

Entrepreneurial behaviors4:42

Risk taking in entrepreneurial decision-making6:44

Risk, uncertainty, and stakeholder involvement8:02

Meet the Instructors

Dr. James V. Green
Director of Entrepreneurship Education
Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute

With entrepreneurial motivations, you want to focus on three distinct elements.

We'll talk about self-efficacy, cognitive motivation, and tolerance for ambiguity.

And this is the second element.

Of the opportunity analysis canvas.

With self-efficacy, it is similar to confidence, but

it's focused on your ability to achieve a specific task.

So this intersects the element of entrepreneurial mind-set and

entrepreneurial motivation.

It's related to control, but again it's activity specific.

You may be a confident person, but

you may not have self-efficacy as its related to public speaking for example.

You may have high confidence in yourself in general, but

you may not have high self-efficacy when it comes to

developing cash-flow statements in an accounting and financial element.

So, in this context, what we want to recognize with self-efficacy,

is that it's a piece of confidence that's task specific.

And it's a top predictor of individual performance in a variety of tasks.

When you think about how to improve your self-efficacy, well mastery is certainly

one of those, and that's building experience and building expertise.

There's role modeling which is observing others.

There is social persuasion, a verbal encouragement from trusted sources from

our friends and family that we can do it.

And there are other psychological cues that play a role as well.

So when we look at some of the great entrepreneurs of our time to

include Thomas Edison, you see a variety of mantras and quotes associated with him.

And so with that we see this element of

a can-do attitude an element of persistence that he exhibits.

Cognitive motivation plays a role in that.

So with cognition as a reminder, this is thinking, the process of thought.

Individuals with a high need for cognition are those that like the research.

They like the hard problems.

They like trying to seek out answers.

Individuals with a lower need for

cognition like to rely on their gut, like to rely on their experience.

In this context, we want to recognize that high cognition.

Is a better indicator of entrepreneurial success.

We want to train ourselves to want to see, to want to acquire, to want to analyze.

So when we think about high cognitive motivation and solving hard problems,

the bag-less vacuum was a tough problem for James Dyson to solve.

Tough in the context that it took 15 years, 5126 iterations to

solve the problem of, how can I make a high performance bag-less vacuum.

Now once he solved that problem he had tremendous success.

And is now one of the wealthiest men in Europe, and

globally, and has a tremendous company with a global footprint.

And has product line extensions into other vacuum as well as hand drying,

bladeless fans, and other technologies that are geared by driving wind.

Either pulling or pushing in a variety of formats, but solve a hard problem.

And was persistent in being able to do it.

The second element that we'll talk about is tolerance for ambiguity.

With tolerance for ambiguity, what we're examining here is the element of trying to

work through and recognize that things change.

And we want to be comfortable with change, and we want to be comfortable with

making difficult decisions in the face of change, with imperfect information.

When we go up to it, this element of ambiguity,

there is a principle called the singularity principle.

That computer, so eventually are going to be one with humans.

And as you seen the trajectory of going from computers that will take up

buildings to rooms, to small room and name frames and desktops, and

laptops, to mobile devices.

The trajectory, if you believe Ray Kurzweil and others.

Is that it's going to be intertwined.

Everybody's going to have a small computer in their brain that's going to

supplement what we do, much like our glasses supplement our vision.

In this way too, we want to think about elements of bias, and

elements of heuristics which are simply mental shortcuts.

That take place in entrepreneurs.

The three that we want to emphasize and be aware of are overconfidence,

representativeness, and counterfactual thinking.

As we look at overconfidence, it's exactly what you think it is.

It's more confidence than is necessarily healthy.

And what we mean by that, is we become overly optimistic

on a fantastical future without any real validation or

data, or research, or analysis to support what we're projecting.

So we want to be confident, but we also want to moderate that optimism through

some of the techniques and some of the research that we talked about previously.

The second element that we want to be aware of is representativeness.

Representativeness is the element of trying to generalize

without appropriate data or rational.

It is asking three people what their favorite color is and

assuming that that's the favorite color of everyone.

This can be very dangerous for

entrepreneurs in that you may build a product that only three people in

the world want.

And so with representativeness, we want to make sure that as we do research,

as we talk with experts,

as we talk with candidate customers that we talk to enough them.

And we talk to the right diversification of them.

To give us some insights, and we don't draw conclusions prematurely.

The last element that we want to reference regarding this principle of bias and

heuristics is counterfactual thinking, the element of what might have been.

What this means for a lot entrepreneurs, particularly young entrepreneurs,

is they often pursue bad ideas.

Because they haven't had enough ideas yet to know what's good and

what's not as good.

There's a fear that they're going to miss out on success.

Now we want you to be action oriented.

We want you to make decisions appropriately quick, but

we also want to caution you against this element of counterfactual thinking and

not being too consumed with a what might of been.

Or I may never have the opportunity again mind-set.

So, a degree of patience, a degree of analysis is certainly well suited and

well purposed for entrepreneurs.

So in summary, while understanding entrepreneurial motivation,

it's going to improve our success as entrepreneurs.

We want to think about how we can develop and cultivate high self-efficacy.

How we can develop an appreciation for

cognitive motivation and learning to love research and analysis.

And we want to also recognize what our own tolerance for ambiguity is.

And how we can be thoughtful in managing that tolerance.

And being effective with operating, relatively quickly,

with imperfect information.

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