AMD 2313



Week 1: Foundations

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Productive Entrepreneurship: Business activities that create genuine economic value, innovate, and contribute positively to societal welfare.

  • Unproductive Entrepreneurship: Activities that exploit loopholes or engage in rent-seeking to redistribute wealth to oneself without creating new value for society.

  • Destructive Entrepreneurship: Illegal or unethical business practices that actively damage the economy, exploit resources, or hurt society.

  • Innovation (I): Birthing the new—introducing novel products, services, processes, or business models to the market.

  • Jobs (J): Economic development generated by young firms (under 5 years old) driving net new job creation.

  • Wealth (W): Generating net new capital and resources that elevate living standards across society.

  • Weak Ties: Relationships with casual acquaintances (as opposed to close friends or family) that act as bridges to unique, non-redundant information and new opportunities.

Example

Productive vs. Unproductive: Inventing a new solar panel technology is Productive (creates new value and jobs). Buying up patents solely to sue smaller businesses without manufacturing anything is Unproductive (rent-seeking).

Weak Ties: You discover an open gap in the supply chain market not from your best friend, but through a short casual conversation with an acquaintance at an industry networking event.

Week 2: Execution & Ventures

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Discovery: The phase where an entrepreneur identifies an unmet market need or an opportunity to introduce new products/services.

  • Evaluation: Assessing whether an opportunity is actually feasible, desirable, and financially viable before committing major resources.

  • Exploitation: Taking concrete actions to execute the opportunity—securing funding, hiring talent, building the product, and launching.

  • Survival Ventures: Low-growth, hand-to-mouth businesses run reactively to provide basic daily income for the owner.

  • Lifestyle Ventures: Small businesses funded by family/friends that target slow growth (<5%) to provide a stable, comfortable lifestyle for the founder.

  • Managed Growth Ventures: Professionalized regional businesses aiming for moderate, controlled growth (10–15%) over a multi-year horizon.

  • Aggressive Growth Ventures: High-stakes, high-potential "gazelles" seeking rapid exponential growth (>20%) backed by private equity or VC funding.

Example

The 3 Steps: You notice a lack of healthy fast food (Discovery), conduct interviews and calculate costs to see if a healthy diner would profit (Evaluation), and then sign a lease and hire staff to open the store (Exploitation).

Ventures: A neighborhood lawn-mowing service operating day-to-day is a Survival Venture, whereas a software startup securing $5M in VC funds to scale globally is an Aggressive Growth Venture.

Week 3: Necessity vs. Opportunity

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Commodity Trap: A situation where a product/service becomes so standardized that customers view all competitors as identical, forcing businesses to compete strictly on low prices and destroying margins.

  • Crossing the Chasm: The difficult transition a growth startup must make between serving early tech adopters and scaling up to capture the mainstream pragmatic market.

  • Social Entrepreneurship: Launching a business primarily focused on solving social, cultural, or environmental issues while remaining financially sustainable.

  • Commercial Entrepreneurship: Launching a venture primarily focused on financial profitability and shareholder returns.

Example

Commodity Trap: Bottled water sellers on a street corner face the Commodity Trap because buyers only care about who sells it cheapest. To escape, a company must differentiate (e.g., selling eco-friendly, reusable aluminum water bottles with electrolytes).

Crossing the Chasm: Electric vehicles were initially bought only by tech enthusiasts (early adopters). Tesla crossed the chasm when mainstream commuters started buying them for everyday utility.

Week 4: Diversity in Entrepreneurship

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Gender Entrepreneurship: Examining the unique structural, financial, and cultural barriers (e.g., funding gaps) faced by women founders.

  • Immigrant Entrepreneurship: Ventures started by immigrants who leverage cross-cultural knowledge, dual networks, and resilience to establish businesses in new countries.

  • Indigenous Entrepreneurship: Business ventures created by and for Indigenous communities that leverage cultural traditions, land, and local collective resources while prioritizing community autonomy and social preservation.

Example

Indigenous Entrepreneurship: An Indigenous-owned eco-tourism resort built on traditional lands that employs local community members, uses proceeds to preserve native wildlife, and retains rights over land governance.

Week 5: Family Business

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Socioemotional Wealth: Non-financial values that family owners derive from their business, such as family pride, social status, preserving reputation, and maintaining identity in the community.

  • Nepotism: Favoring family members over qualified external candidates for job roles or promotions regardless of merit.

  • Resistance to Succession Planning: The hesitation or refusal of founding owners to draft a clear handover plan due to fear of losing control, anxiety about mortality, or desire to avoid triggering family drama.

Example

Socioemotional Wealth vs. Nepotism: A family bakery turns down a lucrative buyout offer from a corporate chain because keeping the family name on the sign provides immense Socioemotional Wealth. However, hiring the founder's unqualified nephew to run operations instead of an experienced manager is Nepotism.

Week 6: Corporate Entrepreneurship

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Innovation: Introducing brand-new products or services inside an existing enterprise.

  • Corporate Venturing: Creating an entirely new semi-autonomous business unit or subsidiary from within a parent firm.

  • Strategic Renewal: A complete, structural repositioning of an organization's core business strategy and market identity.

  • 5 Enablers: Key internal workplace conditions required to foster innovation (e.g., Management Support, Work Discretion/Autonomy, Rewards/Reinforcement, Time Availability, Organizational Boundaries).

Example

Types of Corporate Entrepreneurship: Apple developing the original iPhone is Innovation. Sony establishing a dedicated gaming unit to build PlayStation is Corporate Venturing. IBM completely shifting from selling hardware computers to selling Cloud software subscriptions is Strategic Renewal.

Week 7: International Entrepreneurship

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Born Globals: Companies designed from inception to operate internationally right away.

  • Gradual Internationalizers: Businesses that scale locally first, then expand step-by-step into geographically or culturally close foreign countries.

  • Born-Again Globals: Established domestic firms that suddenly pivot into rapid internationalization following a critical event (e.g., new leadership or foreign acquisition).

  • C.A.G.E. Distance Framework: The four dimensions of distance that create barriers to international success:

  • C - Cultural: Differences in values, languages, norms, and behaviors.

  • A - Administrative: Political ties, trade laws, regulations, tariffs, and legal barriers.

  • G - Geographic: Physical distance, timezone differences, and supply chain logistics complexity.

  • E - Economic: Differences in consumer wealth, income distribution, and economic infrastructure.

Example

C.A.G.E. Framework: Target failed when expanding into Canada due to severe supply chain issues (Geographic Distance) and misjudged pricing strategies relative to US stores (Economic Distance). Walmart failed in Germany because making cashiers smile at customers violated local norms (Cultural Distance).

Week 8: Technology Entrepreneurship

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Technology Entrepreneurship: Creating ventures around radical scientific discoveries or complex engineering inventions (e.g., biotech, advanced materials, hardware).

  • Digital Entrepreneurship: Creating ventures whose operations, products, or services exist primarily on digital media or software platforms (e.g., apps, SaaS, e-commerce).

  • Technology Life Cycle: The stages a breakthrough technology goes through, including Emergence (R&D), Growth, Maturity, and Decline.

Example

Tech vs. Digital: Developing a new lab-engineered synthetic vaccine is Technology Entrepreneurship (long R&D, heavy scientific patents). Building a mobile app that connects dog walkers with pet owners is Digital Entrepreneurship (leveraging existing web platforms and software).

Week 9: Entrepreneurial Ecosystems

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Ecosystem Core Elements: The interconnected network of local actors—universities, venture capital, government policy, talent pools, mentorship networks, and infrastructure—that foster startup creation.

  • Benefits of Ecosystems: Lowers startup costs, speeds up access to capital, and provides immediate density of talent and expertise.

  • Challenges: Difficult to recreate artificially from scratch without organic cultural momentum; risk of brain drain to larger tech hubs.

Example

Ecosystem: Silicon Valley or Waterloo succeed because top technical universities, local VC firms, specialized legal teams, and experienced serial entrepreneurs sit in close proximity, feeding each other resources continuously.

Week 10: Finance & Marketing

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Bootstrapping: Funding a company entirely through personal savings, early operational revenue, and frugal cost-cutting without external investors.

  • Angel Investors: High-net-worth individuals who invest their own personal capital into early-stage startups, often offering mentorship.

  • Venture Capital (VC): Institutional firms that pool capital from investors to back high-growth startups in exchange for significant equity and board influence.

  • Crowdfunding: Raising small amounts of capital from a large public audience via online platforms (e.g., Kickstarter).

  • Traditional Marketing (Top-Down): Formal market research, massive push campaigns, and standard execution of the 4 Ps (Product, Price, Place, Promotion).

  • Entrepreneurial Marketing (Bottom-Up): Interactive, informal, word-of-mouth marketing that leverages direct customer feedback, agility, and community building on a budget.

Example

Funding: Using your own savings and pre-orders to build version 1 of your product is Bootstrapping. Selling 15% equity to an individual mentor for $100k is an Angel Investor deal.

Marketing: Spending $500,000 on billboards and TV ads is Traditional Marketing. Reaching out directly to 20 TikTok influencers to test your product and post honest reviews is Entrepreneurial Marketing.

Week 11: Growing Firms

Definitions & Core Concepts

  • Internal Growth Strategies: Scaling the business organically using internal capabilities (e.g., expanding product lines, entering new geographic markets, opening new stores).

  • External Growth Strategies: Scaling rapidly by merging with, acquiring, or forming strategic alliances/joint ventures with other companies.

Example

Internal vs. External: A popular coffee shop opening 5 new locations in nearby cities using its own profits is pursuing Internal Growth. Buying out a competing coffee chain's 20 locations overnight to eliminate a competitor is pursuing External Growth.