Passion And Entrepreneurship

The Profits and Perils of Passion in Entrepreneurship provides an overview of current knowledge and highlights opportunities ripe for additional investigation. This state-of-the-art book also delivers essential guidelines for scholars on how to study entrepreneurial passion in a rigorous way.

The coauthors of the bestselling Peak Performance dive into the fascinating science behind passion, showing how it can lead to a rich and meaningful life while also illuminating the ways in which it is a double-edged sword. Here’s how to cultivate a passion that will take you to great heights—while minimizing the risk of an equally great fall. Common advice is to find and follow your passion. A life of passion is a good life, or so we are told. But it's not that simple. Rarely is passion something that you just stumble upon, and the same drive that fuels breakthroughs—whether they're athletic, scientific, entrepreneurial, or artistic—can be every bit as destructive as it is productive. Yes, passion can be a wonderful gift, but only if you know how to channel it. If you're not careful, passion can become an awful curse, leading to endless seeking, suffering, and burnout. Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness once again team up, this time to demystify passion, showing readers how they can find and cultivate their passion, sustainably harness its power, and avoid its dangers. They ultimately argue that passion and balance--that other virtue touted by our culture--are incompatible, and that to find your passion, you must lose balance. And that's not always a bad thing. They show readers how to develop the right kind of passion, the kind that lets you achieve great things without ruining your life. Swift, compact, and powerful, this thought-provoking book combines captivating stories of extraordinarily passionate individuals with the latest science on the biological and psychological factors that give rise to—and every bit as important, sustain—passion.

Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) around the world are being pressured to become more entrepreneurial. However, the concept of an entrepreneurial university has remained elusive, including ideas that range from supporting students and staff with new ventures to encouraging partnerships between academics and entrepreneurs. New research is needed on strategies and practices that can be implemented by universities in order to become more innovative and supportive. Strategies for the Creation and Maintenance of Entrepreneurial Universities uses findings from a major EU-funded five country project (THEI2.0) focused on enhancing the implementation and impact of the EU-OECD’s HEInnovate tool to offer valuable strategies to help universities become more entrepreneurial, especially in the current COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 environments. This book’s core value lies in the fact that it draws on real experiences and practices of those in this field, articulates key takeaway messages, and suggests potential strategies and actions to create impact. Covering topics such as campus incubation, policy strategies, and regional development, this book acts as an essential resource for senior academic leaders, academic managers, entrepreneurship/entrepreneurial educators, incubation center managers, technology transfer managers, researchers, students, and administrators seeking to make their university more entrepreneurial, maintain their entrepreneurial status, critically reflect on their current level of entrepreneurialism, explore new opportunities to enhance their entrepreneurial reputation, or implement strategies to consolidate their entrepreneurial endeavors within the current challenging environment.

Pamela Slim, a former corporate training manager, left her office job twelve years ago to go solo and has enjoyed every bit of it. In her groundbreaking book, based on her popular blog Escape from Cubicle Nation, Slim explores both the emotional issues of leaving the corporate world and the nuts and bolts of launching a business. Drawing on her own career, as well as stories from her coaching clients and blog readers, Slim will help readers weigh their options, and make a successful escape if they decide to go for it.

Introducing the global mind-set changing the way we do business. In this fascinating book, global entrepreneurship expert Daniel Isenberg presents a completely novel way to approach business building—with the insights and lessons learned from a worldwide cast of entrepreneurial characters. Not bound by a western, Silicon Valley stereotype, this group of courageous and energetic doers has created a global and diverse mix of companies destined to become tomorrow’s leading organizations. Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid is about how enterprising individuals from around the world see hidden value in situations where others do not, use that perception to develop products and services that people initially don’t think they want, and ultimately go on to realize extraordinary value for themselves, their customers, and society as a whole. What these business builders have in common is a contrarian mind-set that allows them to create opportunities and succeed where others see nothing. Amazingly, this process repeats itself in one form or another countless times a day all over the world. From Albuquerque to Islamabad, you will travel with Isenberg to discover unusual yet practical insights that you can use in your own business. Meet the founders of Grameenphone in Bangladesh, PACIV in Puerto Rico, Sea to Table in New York, Actavis in Iceland, Studio Moderna in Slovenia, Hartwell Metals in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia, Given Imaging in Israel, WildChina in China, and many others. You’ll be moved by the stories of these plucky start-ups—many of them fueled by adversity and, more often than not, by necessity. Great stories, stunning successes, crushing failures—they’re all here. What can we, in the East and West, learn from them? What can you learn—and what will these entrepreneurial stories, so compellingly told, inspire you to do? Let this book open doors for you where you once saw only walls. If you’ve ever felt the urge to turn a glimmer of an idea into something extraordinary, these stories are for you.

Providing new perspectives on the interface between passion and entrepreneurship, this book recognizes that entrepreneurship is not just based on the search for profit. Instead, the entrepreneurial experience incorporates more complex processes, often based on less rational behavior motivated by reasons other than revenue. ‘Passion’ refers both to emotional elements that may fuel an entrepreneurial effort as well as something that feeds the business. The book challenges established views and shows the complexity of the link between passion and entrepreneurship. The authors discuss the main implications for businesses, and explore how passion at the individual and community level influences entrepreneurial efforts. Offering case studies from multiple sectors alongside conceptual frameworks, this edited volume is a useful tool for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers working on entrepreneurship.

Meet Steve Adams, who at age 32 was a banking executive and flying high. Everyone was proud of him. And he was dying inside. Adams had long yearned for something else - a dream that you, too, may harbor in your heart. He had a passion waiting to blossom. He wanted to make it as an entrepreneur in his own business. He wanted to do something meaningful. "Win or lose," he writes, "I knew my only real anguish would be regretting in twenty or thirty years why that young man never just took that chance." Today, Adams operates successful Pet Supplies Plus stores across the country. His was a journey of severe challenges overcome, and in The Passionate Entrepreneur he shares his mistakes and heartaches and what he learned from them in his pursuit of success. He imparts the lessons about the systems and strategies essential to running a successful business. Among them: how to treat employees, appeal to customers, and establish your brand, all the while paying meticulous attention to the bottom line. Above all, however, an entrepreneur must understand the true bottom line - the meaning of success itself. Adams knows that business without passion is a mere exercise in numbers. Profit without purpose can drain the soul. He wanted to be an entrepreneur so that he could lead others to a better life - his family, his employees, his clients, and his community. An entrepreneur needs a mission and absolute clarity about what he or she wants to accomplish. The Passionate Entrepreneur is a book of encouragement for those who are ready to pursue their dreams and for those who fear, in their frustration, that they have forgotten them. Steve Adams gets to the heart of the matter, and he is waiting to speak to you. Foreword by Lee Milteer

Creativity can be viewed as the first stage of the overall innovation process, an important dimension of the entrepreneurship and new venture creation processes, and as such, it is considered to be a cornerstone of organizational competitiveness in this global, knowledge-based economy. Research on creativity has increasingly become multilevel, with most work conducted at the individual or team level of analysis. At the same time, there is a large body of research being conducted at the organizational level of analysis on innovation, and there has been a significant amount of entrepreneurship research at the individual level, with an increasing focus on organizational entrepreneurship. However, these three research streams have developed independently, and there has been very little knowledge transfer between the three areas. Because entrepreneurship is often said to be a process that is required to convert innovation into business ventures that will deliver benefits to stakeholders, it is typically driven by an individual or small group of individuals. Creativity research, innovation research, and entrepreneurship research have the potential to inform each other, enriching our knowledge of each area, particularly with regard to the cognitive processes and behaviors that are most effective. This Handbook includes contributions from the leading scholars in these three research areas, who integrate contemporary research findings on organizational creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship and provide fruitful new research directions."