• What characterizes the entrepreneur as an individual
• How to assess a venture in a geographical, demographical, and industry context
• The role played by entrepreneurial activity in shaping industrial evolution and economic development
• Creating, writing and critically assessing business plans
• Key historical ventures that captured great market shares and how they did it

The entrepreneur himself/herself or the start-up is the point of departure of the course. We map the demographic pattern of entrepreneurial activity by studying the social-psychology of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, by reviewing gender effect and by examining predisposition elements of the entrepreneur. We scrutinize how individuals build entrepreneurial skills and the factors that shape the individuals’ capacity to develop the ability to identify opportunities. We then move on to consider the firm level by investigating why the entrepreneurial spirit varies across firms and what finally defines a successful start-up or small business. We consider the role of venture capital in shaping entrepreneurship and address how geography plays a role in determining the level of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial survival rates. The course also contains a section on how to develop a business plan. We provide examples of factual business plans illustrating the usage, applicability and value of such documents.

Among the questions raised and discussed are:
Who are entrepreneurs?
What is a business plan and what is its role?
What does the successful venture look like?
Does geographic location matter?
How does founder’s prior experience shape the survival of the start-up?
Does innovation automatically foster successful entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship involves among other things creating new businesses, developing business plans, recognising, capturing and exploiting opportunities, and assessing the advantages and disadvantages of a start-up. The Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses course provides students with the skills to conduct in depth analysis of entrepreneurial ventures, assess self-employment opportunities, and develop well-founded, reliable and sensible business plans. The overall intention is to provide students with the required tools to become visionary entrepreneurs or small business analysts who posses the ability to recognize both potentials and pitfalls of new ventures. Aiming at this, we introduce students to concepts like demographic context, geographic locations, predisposition effects, competitive pressures that represent useful and valuable data for any individual that wish to analyse existing or planned ventures for own or others benefit.  
 

Koehn, Nancy F. (2001) Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumer’ Trust from Wedgewood to Dell. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press.
Blanchflower, D. G. & Oswald, A. J. (1998). What Makes An Entrepreneur?, Journal of Labour Economics, 16(1): 26-60
Ruef, M., Aldrich, H., & Carter, N. (2003). The Structure of Founding Teams: Homophily, Strong Ties, and Isolation Among U.S. Entrepreneurs, American Sociological Review, 68, 195-222.
Shane, S. & Cable, D. (2002). Network Ties, Reputation and the Financing of New Ventures, Management Science, 48(3): 364-381
Dahl, M. S. & Reichstein, T. (2007) Are You Experienced? - Prior Experience of Managers and the Survival of New Organizations, Industry and Innovation, Vol. 14(5), pp. 497-511