Saras Sarasvathy Explains the Entrepreneurial Method | Big Think
Saras Sarasvathy Explains the Entrepreneurial Method
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TRANSCRIPT:
Question: What method do entrepreneurs use?
Saras Sarasvathy: I presented the entrepreneurial worldview fully born, if you will. But in actual fact I had to understand that by looking at what entrepreneurs actually do in a micro level, if you will. So in my research, I talked to a whole bunch of, you could call them successful entrepreneurs, but success was only a part of their story. I call them expert entrepreneurs. These are people who had several years of founding experience, of multiple firms, often success and failures and they had learned to perform well overtime. So they had taken at least one company public so of course people see them as successful entrepreneurs. And, when you study how they think and I gave them a 17-page problem set of typical start-of-decisions that all entrepreneurs have to make in starting a company. So I got to see at the micro level the kinds of things that they do. Not just the whole world view of how they think but how they implement that world view in their practical day to day business problem solving if you will and I found the CDs of things that they do and I wrote about five of these, the five principles in my book but I suspect there are more. And I think, as I teach and I look at more histories of entrepreneurs and I talk to them I think there will be more. So I don’t want to talk about this, that there are only five principles, but I can give you some examples.
So, one of the things I always talk about to my students is about cooking. Now, I say there are at least two ways of cooking. One is to start with a dish that you want to make and when you have a great recipe, go get the ingredients and then you make the dish. The other way, the way most of us cook I think, is we stumble into the kitchen, open the refrigerator and find stuff and if you come into my house you would find brown powder that you might have to smell to know what it is because I’m making it in food. And so, you kind of look at what you have and then you try to make something with it. The interesting question here is what difference does it make whether you cook using a recipe and proper ingredients or whether you stumble into the kitchen and cook something. It depends on how good a cook you are, what you end up cooking. So, you can get away from the basic ideas that you need to understand about running a business, so you still need to know how to manage your cash flow and things like that; but, when you just stumble into the kitchen and cook, what happens is, assuming you know how to cook and you’re a good cook, you are much more likely to come up with a new dish that even you might not have actually planned to make. Whereas if you are cooking from a recipe would get that dish, right? You wouldn’t get some of the new dish and that’s the interesting part of it.
So it’s not really a question of this is better than that, it is just that the way entrepreneurs do it, they work with what they have and they look around and say, “What can I do with this?” And then, “What else can I do with it?” So it goes back to the idea of doing the doable and then pushing it. So they just look around at the resources that are available to them and by resources I don’t even mean money. A lot of the entrepreneurs I study started with things like who I am, what I know and whom I know. So they are looking at what kind of a person am I, what kinds of things turn me on, what kind of things that I just will not do because it goes against my values. So, they have a sense of self. They know what they know and very often they are very good at knowing what they don’t know. So they look at what they know and don’t know and they look at the people that they know and they start talking to the people almost immediately and they bring them on board very early on. So they work with what they have to create something new. So that’s a technique and there are lots of techniques connected with that that we can learn and teach. It’s very useful in the classroom.
The second thing that they are very good at doing is to think through in deciding what to do with what you have. They are not really thinking about where will I get the biggest bang from the buck, which one is likely to lead me to the most profit? Instead they constantly asked themselves, “Would I do this even if I know I’m going to lose what I am investing in it?”
Read the full transcript at bigthink.com/videos/saras-sar...
Пікірлер: 23
This is the best definition of entrepreneurship ever!
I was reading about effectuation in a book, read everything but it was still a bit hazy. But listening to the actual term coiner made it so easy to understand.
Brilliant!
This video helped give me a new perspective on entrepreneurship
I love it!
Wow!!!!
this light reflection in her glasses.... :D
She’s basically speaking on founder product fit and founder market fit. Basically be honest with yourself and see what you are actually capable of doing. You still need to validate a problem exists or else your company will just be a hobby.
Can it be used for consultant? for managers?
Mam, according to you, motivation leads to a good Entrepreneurial career. I want 2 ask you about some decisions that I find hard to take. Like, if Im interested in doing a particular business in my city, where there are some "pre-established" organisatins/company doing the same business over years. Im passionate about doing the business always wanted to have the work done by me. Now should I do it or leave the idea? If i choose to stick, what strategy according to you should be preferable?
@PLF...
4 жыл бұрын
What she is saying is that you start out with what you have, and then you figure out where to go along the way. It's specifically to avoid this idea of "doing a particular business", it's about taking what is available and doable with the means you have.
@husseinkhaled4766
4 жыл бұрын
I am a business owner and am doing my Masters, and all of this is a bull shit and not useful just bring me a one entrepreneur who is doing and does what she says I own my business, and I already have my family business SInce 1932, and I am in a network of high growth ventures owner and we never think like that or in this subjective way any way entrepreneurship can't be taught and by the way there is a quote says " if you don't know how to do things, so better to teach it " and this what happens, the talkative lecturers who keeps on talking day and night about how to do a business and there are just taking salaries such a miss
Saras "If you will" Sarasvathy
Someone who's never run a business talks non stop for 10 minutes without actually saying anything.
@Jackson_Zheng
2 ай бұрын
As someone who is running a business right now, I find this video to be incredibly helpful in changing the way I think right now. I'm often absorbed in the day to day stuff that you get tunnel vision and are biased towards making certain decisions that aren't always rational or the most efficient.
@GabrielWJensen
2 ай бұрын
@@Jackson_Zheng As someone who at the time I wrote this comment, had to write a huge college paper on this topic, I still didn't learn anything that I can apply in the real world. She is saying nothing but utter nonsense for 10 minutes straight.
@jessinystrom9635
Ай бұрын
@@GabrielWJensen except she absolutely has run her own businesses
I am a business owner and am doing my Masters, and all of this is a bull shit and not useful just bring me a one entrepreneur who is doing and does what she says I own my business, and I already have my family business SInce 1932, and I am in a network of high growth ventures owner and we never think like that or in this subjective way any way entrepreneurship can't be taught and by the way there is a quote says " if you don't know how to do things, so better to teach it " and this what happens, the talkative lecturers who keeps on talking day and night about how to do a business and there are just taking salaries such a miss
@aalbayr
4 жыл бұрын
If you've had your business since 1932, you're simply not an entrepreneur, but the owner of an established business. Her research is meant to understand how entrepreneurs make decisions when they start their venture. The main idea is that they depart from who they are, what they know and whom they know when they create their first product & initial customers. This is an inductive approach and quite different from day-to-day management of an established business. On the contrary, managers and business owners like yourself analyze customer expectations, do market research, do sales pitch, invest in capital, etc. Because they already have a product that they know it sells, they have customers and some experience on what works and what doesn't in their line of business. Thus what is to be done is day-to-day execution. This is deductive thinking, and quite different from what I explained in the previous paragraph. Entrepreneurs also do these things of course, but when they are at their very early stage, when everything is uncertain about their business, they don’t even know if their idea is the right idea, whether their product would sell, what features would customers want, etc. they turn to inductive thinking, and drive form their own network and experiences in shaping their idea. This is what she is trying to talk about. If you ask any professor interested in entrepreneurship studies, they will explain in detail. Of course if you think all they say is bullshit, you won't bother, cos you know it all. Then why even pursue a master's degree anyway. ..and there is an extension to your quote "if you don't know how to do things, better to teach it"; it goes "if you don't understand a thing, better to discredit it" - and that's simply what you do here. There are those who are involved in entrepreneurship, and those who study entrepreneurship. You don't have to be an entrepreneur to study entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs; that's a different line of work, which applies scientific method to discover phenomena. Surely there's more in the world of entrepreneurship beyond your experience and understanding. Of course your personal experiences are very valuable, but scientists (in any field) try to draw from the experiences of at least dozens of people to come up with knowledge generalizable to everyone. This is the job of scientists, and the experience of a single person is not sufficient to explain the whole phenomenon. And I don't mean that scientists are better (or more valuable) entrepreneurs. I think entrepreneurship is usually much harder than scientific work. Speaking as a former entrepeneur and a PhD candidate.
@celsobrito7139
3 жыл бұрын
I think the question here is "I already have my family business SInce 1932". So, this means you are not an entrepreneur. You are just continuing a business your family started. Being an entrepreneur is another thing, is more related to what she is saying.
@southbaycommuter
3 жыл бұрын
@Hussien: Financial opportunity: Invest in an web app called, "Grammarly." Their AI is disrupting the entire industry with innovative concepts such as the "comma" and the "period." Grammarly is poised to make the run on sentence obsolete!
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