The Entrepreneur S Choice

(Black & White version) Fundamentals of Business was created for Virginia Tech's MGT 1104 Foundations of Business through a collaboration between the Pamplin College of Business and Virginia Tech Libraries. This book is freely available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10919/70961 It is licensed with a Creative Commons-NonCommercial ShareAlike 3.0 license.

Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) are integral to the economic policy framework of India, and promote innovation, competition and equitable economic development. Comprehensively examining the management of family businesses among MSMEs, this book: • discusses business strategy, corporate and personal values, vision, mission, stakeholder expectations, and strategic response to external factors along with their social and environmental orientation; • includes 22 case studies drawn from varied sectors such as pharmaceuticals, food processing, engineering, and blood banking; • documents rich experiences of Indian entrepreneurs and their unique entrepreneurial approaches towards management of social enterprises, loss-making firms in the public sector, corporate social responsibility, succession planning, and innovation. The book will prove essential to students and scholars of business, entrepreneurship and management, and entrepreneurs and managers working in MSMEs, especially young entrepreneurs as well as the general reader.

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

What type of business should you start? For the past 10 years, Inc. 500 CEO and #1 national best-selling author, Ryan Levesque--featured for his work in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Forbes, and Entrepreneur--has guided thousands of entrepreneurs through the journey of answering this question. One of the biggest reasons why so many new businesses fail is because in the quest to decide what business to start, most of the conventional wisdom is wrong. Instead of obsessing over what--as in what should you sell or what should you build--you should first be asking who. As in who should you serve? The what is a logical question that will come soon enough. But choosing your who is the foundation from which all other things are built. That is what this book is all about. If you've ever had the dream to start your own business, become your own boss, or do your own thing--but have been afraid to take the leap and screw up your already good life--this book is for you. You will find the meticulously tested, step-by-step process outlined in the book is easy to follow, despite being the result of a decade of research and experience. This process, designed to minimize your risk of failure and losing money up front, coupled with the inspiring stories of everyday people who have used this process to launch successful businesses, will not only give you clarity on what type of business to start, but also the confidence to finally take that leap and get started.

Rapid and controversial, the spread of school choice initiatives across the United States has radically changed political debate about public education. In this book, Michael Mintrom explores the complex world of open-enrollment policies, charter schools and voucher plans to reveal how and why school choice has become a major issue, and he draws important conclusions about how innovative individuals can spur significant change in the policy arena. Policy entrepreneurs—individuals who take up a cause and make it part of the political agenda—have largely remained background figures without clear definition in the policymaking literature. This book is the first comprehensive and systematic treatment of the concept of policy entrepreneurship, providing an important foundation for explaining how policy proposals are initiated, considered, and adopted. Mintrom uses the emergence of school choice in state politics to examine how policy change originates. He shows how policy entrepreneurs have been instrumental in placing school choice onto state legislative agendas, despite the lack of compelling evidence about its merits, and how they use social networks, reframe policy issues, and attempt to shift the sites of policy debate. Blending innovative theory with both qualitative and quantitative investigation, Mintrom explains how energetic individuals made school choice a real choice. In doing so, he changes our broader understanding of how policy is formed.

The study extends the literature on venture capital by examining whether entrepreneur’s choice for an external investor and certain firm characteristics have an impact on venture success or not. The focus is set on the differences in value creation by venture capitalists and business angels for ventures of the high- and low-technology sector. The assessment of a data set including 252 Series A financing rounds by venture capitalist firms, business angels and collaborative investments of both investors conducted between 2005 and 2012 unveils value enhancing aspects for all three financing solutions. Overall, start-ups initially financed by venture capitalist firms perform best with regard to general venture success, whereas start-ups collaboratively supported by venture capitalists and business angels have the highest chances to exit successfully through a trade sale. It becomes further apparent that ventures located in one of the high-technology industries ‘internet’, ‘pharmaceuticals’ and ‘high-tech’, ventures that are longer established in the market and ventures whose Series A financing round was executed more recently indicate an enhanced likelihood of success.

This publication identifies the reason leading small business owner-managers to choose stock-type public funding, and assesses the effects of their choice on both themselves and their firm. It compares listed and unlisted firms.