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Entrepreneurship – from ideas to reality
Entrepreneurship – from ideas to reality

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1 Are you an entrepreneur?

You may well have a good idea, but does that make you an entrepreneur? The term entrepreneurship is a troublesome one to define – does it describe a type of person, or a way of doing business? More importantly, is it something you are born with or something you can develop? Entrepreneurship and enterprise are closely related concepts. Below are two definitions that the rest of this course is based on.

Entrepreneurs are those persons (business owners) who seek to generate value, through the creation or expansion of economic activity, by identifying and exploiting new products, processes or markets.

(Blundel, et al., 2018, p. 3)

Entrepreneurs are defined by their actions (not the size of organization they work for*). They create and/or exploit change for profit, by innovating, accepting risk and moving resources to areas of higher return.

Enterprise is an alternative term for a business or firm, as in the widely used term ‘small and medium sized enterprise’ (SME). They include ‘social enterprises’ which are trading organisations that serve a primary social purpose, and which can take a variety of legal forms….

*An intrapreneur is a salaried employee in a larger company and the profits and risks of their work go to their employer.

(Blundel, et al., 2018, p. 4)

In these definitions you will hopefully recognise yourself – or the possibility that you can become an entrepreneur if you have an idea and you know how to exploit it.

In this course you are also going to learn through the experiences of real entrepreneurs who are in the process of developing and growing their own venture. You will be introduced to four of them here and as you work your way through the course they will describe some of the key decisions they made, and why.

  1. Claudio Marturano, Nubis Aviation Training
  2. Emma Prince, Evolve Intervention (www.evolve-intervention.com/)
  3. Nick Allen, Flo and Vie (www.floandvie.co.uk)
  4. Alex Bond, CEO of Fresh Check (www.freshcheck.com)
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Transcript: Video 1 Who are you and what is your enterprise?

CLAUDIO MARTURANO:
My name is Claudio Marturano. I'm an MBA student of the Open University. And my company is called Nubis Aviation Ltd. It's a training organisation for maintenance personnel within the aviation industry.
It came about because, from my 14 years experience in the industry and when I was the chief engineer for my last company, I found that I couldn't find a provider for the needs that I wanted. There was a need in the market for training of personnel. And there was no solid solution in order to actually keep the costs down and keep the momentum up for the individual. And so the concept of my business came around that way.
EMMA PRINCE:
My name is Emma Prince. And I am the Director of Evolve Intervention. We are an early intervention service, based in Essex. And we provide support and help to children of all ages, all the way up to adulthood through group work, through intervention, through one-to-one support, and working with schools and other organisations, as well as families and parents.
NICK ALLEN:
So I'm Nick Allen. Our company is Flo and Vie . And we produce luxury accessories. Our business started with cards and putting my wife's designs onto these cards. We took them to shows and trade fairs. And we got lots of feedback from people saying, you should put these onto silk scarves. And so now we produce my wife's designs on silk scarves. And we are now in our third year of doing that.
ALEX BOND:
I'm Alex Bond from Fresh Check. And I founded it with two of my colleagues from Imperial College, London. We help people test their hygiene. So at the moment, abattoirs have a really big issue. And anywhere any food production service has a really big issue-- that they can't test their hygiene.
So they don't know whether they're up to scratch. And a quarter of all hygiene tests in these areas in food production fail. And so we're offering the first affordable and easy method to help people identify when they're at risk of contamination.
End transcript: Video 1 Who are you and what is your enterprise?
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Video 1 Who are you and what is your enterprise?
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Next you will consider the source and inspiration for a business idea.