Entrepreneurship 3rd Edition by William D. Bygrave
ISBN 9781118582893
The green shoots of entrepreneurship give an economy its vitality. They give rise to new
products and services, fresh applications for existing products and services, and new ways of
doing business. Entrepreneurship stirs up the existing economic order and prunes out the dead
wood. Established companies that fail to adapt to the changes cease to be competitive in the
marketplace and go out of business.
Within the broadest definition, entrepreneurs are found throughout the world of business
because any firm, big or small, must have its share of entrepreneurial drive if it is to survive and
prosper. This textbook focuses on starting and growing independent new ventures. It is based
on entrepreneurship courses taught at Babson College and at universities around the world.
One of the most common questions that entrepreneurship educators are asked is,
Can entrepreneurship be taught? Our response is that anyone with a desire to become an
entrepreneur will be more successful if he or she has taken a course on how to start and grow
a new venture. About 30% of the students who have taken the new-venture course at Babson
College since 1985 have gone on to start full-time businesses at some time in their careers.
Many have started more than one.
While this textbook empowers would-be entrepreneurs to start and grow their new
ventures, it?s not only for them. Any student who reads this book will learn about the
entrepreneurial process and the role of entrepreneurship in the economy. We believe that all
business students, regardless of whether they start a new business, will benefit from learning
about entrepreneurship. After all, entrepreneurship and small business create most of the jobs
in the U.S. economy and account for almost half the GDP. They are ubiquitous, and so integral
to the economy that almost every student will work in one way or another with entrepreneurs
and small businesses after graduation. This textbook will stand students in good stead?not
only for starting their own firms, but also for dealing with startups as investors, bankers,
accountants, lawyers, customers, vendors, employees, landlords, and in any other capacity.
An entrepreneurial revolution has transformed the economy since the mid-1970s. Central
to that revolution is information technology, especially personal computers and the Internet.
Information technology has profoundly changed the way companies do business, none more
so than startup companies. Today?s students were born after the personal computer came into
common use, and they came of age in the era of the Web. Webelieve they need an entrepreneurship
text in which information technology is completely integrated all the way through.
This book combines concepts and cases to present the latest theory about entrepreneurship
and relate actual experiences. The concepts cover what would-be entrepreneurs need to know
to start and grow their businesses, and the cases illustrate how real entrepreneurs have gone
out and done it. They cover all stages of the entrepreneurial process, from searching for an
opportunity to shaping it into a commercially attractive product or service, launching the new
venture, building it into a viable business, and eventually harvesting it.
