Trevon Jones
Professor Trost
EEE-2083
29 Jan 2023
Aspect of Entrepreneurship
Primary Reading
We were tasked to read three required readings. I feel we want are doing this to understand what important aspect of entrepreneurship we should consider moving forward. From the required readings I started with the primary reading. The name of this article is What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? This raises the question of which aspect of an entrepreneur makes them entrepreneurial. The article starts by questioning what aspects and if the core of entrepreneurship is learnable. Sarasvathy wanted to meet with 30 entrepreneurs that have created ventures that have profited 200 million to 6.5 Billion. These ventures ranged from teddy bears to railroads and steel. Sarasvathy wanted to get their stories to see what thought process they went through in finding a problem and making a solution, then turning that idea into a firm (p. 2). What Sarasvathy found was when she was the idea of effectual reasoning. Effectual reasoning is the process that permits goals to come up without a main goal beginning placed. So it's a way for different goals to be set along the way. This is the opposite of casual reasoning, the idea of starting with a set goal in mind. Sarasvathy claims that both effectual and causal reasoning can be used depending on what situation is present. For example, it would probably be better to start with effectual reasoning because when starting out it would be better to focus on multiple aspects of a company so you can get to a place where you can focus on one main goal. The process of effectual reasoning isn’t hard to understand because I feel these are basic for an entrepreneur to know and understand. The first step of this process is finding out who you are as an entrepreneur. Do this by finding out what traits and abilities you have as an entrepreneur. The second step is finding out what they know. This means what is the entrepreneur’s education and training. In other words what experience the entrepreneur has? The third and find step of this process is finding out who the entrepreneur knows. This is important because it gives insight into their personal networks. There is logic to effectual and causal reasoning. The logic with casual reasoning is we can somewhat predict the future, so we should be able to control it. And effectual reasoning is different in some aspects. For effectual reasoning, the idea is that we can change the future we don't need to control it. With this in mind, effectual reasoning is better for the beginning stages of a company. Saravathy States at the end of her article what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial. “Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurial, as differentiated from managerial or strategic, because they think effectually; they believe in a yet-to-be-made future that can substantially be shaped by human action; and they realize that to the extent that this human action can control the future,” (What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial, pg. 9). Saravathy wanted to explain with effectual reason that future can be changed with human actions on society and in the world.
Secondary Readings
For the secondary readings, the idea of the first article was to find the meaning of entrepreneurship. The author Robert F Hebert found that entrepreneurship is one of the most important factors of economics having 12 principles. From these principles, he found that the meaning is a sort of freedom that can be had by entrepreneurship. Also, entrepreneurship opens a world of opportunity through action from the entrepreneur. Herbert states that entrepreneurial action potentially leads to the creation of opportunities or solutions to current situations. The basic ideas of entrepreneurship are perception and action. (In Search of the Meaning of Entrepreneurship. Pg. 48.) In the other secondary reading Who is an Entrepreneur Is the Wrong Question we are tasked to find out why this question is wrong to help us further understand what aspect of entrepreneurship is important. The author William B. Gartner states that the idea of entrepreneurship is the creation of an organization. Gartner understands that entrepreneurs have certain traits that all have in common. The idea of this is a way to figure out who is an entrepreneur by finding out what they do, and not who they are. Garther states that the research should be conducted on the action of the entrepreneur and not who they are in terms of action. ("Who Is an Entrepreneur?" Is the Wrong Question. Pg. 21.) Furthermore in the article Garther believes that we don’t ask what makes a dancer a dancer and we don't separate that dance and the dancer, we instead analyzed the action of the dancer and determine if they are a dancer or not. And we can do the same with entrepreneurship.