Tag: enterprise

The Faculty of Business has five schools: business; management; law; government; and tourism & hospitality. The Business School focuses on undergraduate courses while the Plymouth Graduate School of Management has a range of post-graduate courses (listed at the bottom of its website page) including entrepreneurship.

The staff in the Faculty of Business are shown here.

All the post-graduate courses offered by the university are listed here.

The Futures Entrepreneurship Centre … “seeks to instil and develop entrepreneurial skills of students within the Faculty of Business” … and is linked to the MSc programmes in ‘Entrepreneurship‘  and ‘Entrepreneurship and International Development‘. Its activities “focus on contributing towards the socio-economic growth of the area through five pillars” These are: global thinking; sustainability; ethics; entrepreneurialism; and innovation. It has a blog.

The BETA Enterprise Programme enables UK undergraduate and postgraduate students currently studying at the university to develop a business idea alongside their course studies.The programme provides:

• a business mentor (either a university expert, an entrepreneur or  a member of the Plymouth business community) to guide the development of the business idea;
• a programme of workshops, guest lectures and networking events which run from November until June;
• an opportunity to pitch to a panel for funding of up to £1,500 which can be used to buy materials and products needed for the business, to rent incubation space, to pay for training and professional courses or to cover legal costs.

The Faculty of Business has local and regional enterprise partnerships, eg an affiliation with the Growth, Acceleration and Investment Network (GAIN) – see separate blog post.

In this video, Steve Blank identifies six different types of startup:

1. lifestyle start-up – an enterprise where a single entrepreneur makes a sufficient living out of pursuing a passion (for example surfing);
2. small business startup – intended to be a nothing more than a profitable small enterprise such as family grocery store;
3. scalable start-up – the founders have £billion ambitions for growth to become a large company;
4. large company sustaining innovation – initiatives within a large company to stimulate innovation in order to maintain competitive position.;
5. buyable start-up – a startup intended to be sold to a large corporation once the business model has been shown to work; and
6. social entrepreneurship start-ups.

Blank argues that these each need different entrepreneurial skillsets.

A business model helps to answer the question: how do you plan to make money? Behind that question are other questions:

• Who’s your target customer?
• What customer problem or challenge do you solve?
• What value do you deliver?
• How will you reach, acquire, and keep customers?
• How will you define and differentiate your offering?
• How will you generate revenue?
• What’s your cost structure?
• What’s your profit margin?

 

In this 42 minute video, Alex Osterwalder gives a good explanation of the Business Model Canvas.