Opportunity-centred entrepreneurship in context
This is a reflection on Opportunity-Centred Entrepreneurship and its contribution to entrepreneurial theory, learning and practice " ,
This book has aimed to increase your awareness, skills and readiness to act in entrepre-neurial ways. It puts the human experience of entrepreneurship at its heart, by focusing it as a real-world learning process. You will have your own views on how useful this has been for you. So the approach concentrates on personal and social development, in the wider context of family, community, work and life experience. It emphasises that entrepre¬neurship is a path open to everyone, because the skills and approaches are capable of being learned. It offers a focus, a way of working, questions to ask and tools to use. It is a joined-up approach to entrepreneurship.
We can go further than this and suggest that enterprising behaviour is a normal and everyday aspect of human life. People are inherently curious about problems, opportuni¬ties and possibilities. We like playing, whether this is playing with people, with ideas, with tangible objects and technology, or with pictures and music. Just as everyone is inherently creative, everyone has the latent capacity for enterprise.
However, to develop and make use of this, we have to recognise that people have power¬ful and sometimes disempowering formative experiences in society. Families, communities, educational and government systems and employers have very strong formative influences which can encourage or discourage creativity and enterprise, sometimes by exercising repres¬sive control. So whilstindividuals have choices and are responsible for taking or not taking enterprising choices, the social worlds within which we live influence and enable or constrain these choices in many ways. Therefore there is much more to becoming an enterprising or opportunity society than simply encouraging individual enterprise. The concepts behind Opportunity-Centred Entrepreneurship need to be adopted above the level of the individ¬ual, by educational institutions, business support and government agencies. These issues will be addressed in the next section.
It is significant that major movements in management thinking and practice have often been accompanied by the development of accompanying touls, language and defined practices. If we think of such movements as total quality and the related Kaizen movement, strategic management, business process re-engineering and knowledge management, they have been implemented and enacted with the help of defined or 'best practice' methods. Whether we agree that the movements themselves and the tools used have been effective is another matter, but there is a body of knowledge and practice avail¬able for use. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial management are notably different, in lacking an acknowledged base of knowledge and practice. If you read the leading texts on the subject you will find a rich assortment of theory, many case studies, some decision¬making frameworks usually derived from a financial base, and one recurring tool - the business plan. This is an area in which educators and writers on entrepreneurship have so far largely failed to develop a useful and sound methodology for the discipline. Surely there is more to entrepreneurial practice than the business plan?
So it is proposed that one important contribution that Opportunity-Centred Entrepre¬neurship makes is to provide a process and a set of tools. They are not the only tools, but they are a start. The process and tools may not be ideal for every situation, but they are flexible and can be added to. Some of the tools, such as the opportunity mapping and sensemaking approaches, have been gathered and adapted from other sources outside entrepreneurial practice. Others, such as the opportunity assessment tool, have been devel¬oped and tested over several years. People can use these as a starting point and adapt them for their own needs and situation. The result can be systemic improvement in the way that entrepreneurial opportunities are developed and implemented because there is now a framework and methodology which we can use.