Enabling entrepreneurship

Research

Generate insights into entrepreneurial thinking, process, and practice.

Learning and development

Develop an entreprenerial mindset to transform individuals, teams, and organizations.

Collaboration

Enhance innovative performance, valuation and finance in entrepreneurial settings.

from the blog

A teaser

A simple game ushers us into the world of entrepreneurship as a constant interplay between value and meaning. In the word ladder game, allegedly invented by Lewis Carroll, one connects two initial words via a chain of successive words that differ only by one letter....

What is an opportunity?

Describing someone as entrepreneur gives us no sense of what they are trying to do, other than looking to change the world in some way. To say they are starting a new venture is similarly uninformative. They are trying to make something work, but what? We need a...

Who is an entrepreneur?

We can’t recognise entrepreneurs, the way we recognise doctors or teachers,  from the settings in which they operate. When we think of entrepreneurship as a force of the new, driven by human imagination and ingenuity, then entrepreneurs are defined by their...

What is entrepreneurship?

Deceptively simple, this question invites us to choose conceptual categories under which to describe entrepreneurship. Each category makes salient distinctions, enabling us to make comparisons and identify similarities and differences with what can be deemed...

Sidestepping reason

Our inherent creativity and hopefulness - the urge and passion to try new things - are often deemed unreasonable. That is, it is impossible for others to see any point to them or they simply seem too far fetched. This reflects a pervasive genius-vs.-lunatic tension...

Holding the bag … of uncertainty

Every entrepreneurial project has a large degree of uncertainty that cannot be eliminated. The inability to foresee not only the outcomes of our actions, but also the consequences of those outcomes, and the meaning of those consequences represents an irreducible...

Insights

In a world where entrepreneurial success often seems deceptively accessible, it is not always clear what makes a person entrepreneurial. In The Reflective Entrepreneur, Dimo Dimov offers a reflective insight into the entrepreneurial journey, striking up a conversation about entrepreneurship in order to challenge and untangle existing preconceptions.

Open access

Dimo Dimov’s innovative book examines what it means to be an entrepreneurial scholar, drawing on a range of philosophical ideas to investigate the study of entrepreneurs. Dimov makes the case for entrepreneurial scholarship to become more future-oriented and creates a framework, highlighting four styles and approaches to the field: theoretical, integrative, craft and clinical.

Open access

Leveraging future thinking

The practice of management remains stubbornly anchored to the notion of execution. Under its graviational pull, there is emphasis on efficiency, checklists, short-term results. How can organizations promote discovery, unleash curiosity, and leverage future thinking?

The power of the human mind

The 2021 Global Peter Drucker Forum prompts us to think about what it means to be human in a digital age. In this piece, we reflect on the relationship between humans and technology and the power of the human mind. Technology can out-muscle us, out-compute us, but can it out-imagine us?

The humility of not knowing

Every innovation project combines the commitment and hope of what we want to happen and how with the humility of not knowing what might happen or what paths to take. Organisations are great at extracting commitments and aggregating them on a vertical chain of accountability. While this creates synthetic certainty at the top, humility and the questions it invites are bagged and left behind. Leaders must empty this baggage and let uncertainty in, like fresh air.

Being entrepreneurial

Complex outcomes need not arise from complex actions. To be entrepreneurial is to engage with the world in a particular way. This is challenging when legacy looms large and when the comforts of the status quo can lull us into complacency. In this piece, we show how our Kinetic Thinkingframework can be distilled into simple (but not simplistic) heuristics for an entrepreneurial mindset.

Managing in a dynamic lanscape

To help organizations meet today’s challenges, managers must move from: directive to instructive, restrictive to expansive, exclusive to inclusive, repetitive to innovative, problem solving to challenging, and employer to entrepreneur.

Time, players and analysts

To be an entrepreneur is to be future oriented and take chances. It is to move with time, always standing at its edge and looking ahead.

Measuring innovation

Sometimes we just have to learn to value the things we can’t easily measure or hold. As that other famous saying goes, “Not everything that can be counted counts; and not everything that counts can be counted.”

Unlocking new ways of thinking

We understand the idea of constantly upgrading and improving, just look at our phone devices. But how much emphasis do we put on upgrading our own self, our thinking and innovative learning? You constantly need to refresh and stay ahead of the game.

Supporting entrepreneurial ideas

To support entrepreneurship, we need to accept a simple yet profound truth: not every venture effort will succeed, but a great success can come from anywhere.