Week 2 Reading Reflection

Hey everyone,

This week's reading reflection came out of Entrepreneurship, by Donald F. Kuratko (our textbook for the semester), and it was from Chapter 1 titled "Entrepreneurship: Evolutionary Development - Revolutionary Impact", and while this was practically an "intro" chapter in the book, I felt that there were a lot of useful things to take away from this reading.

The thing that really surprised me the most, or stood out to me, was that fact that there are so many types of entrepreneurship, along with numerous scenarios that can take place throughout an entrepreneurial venture. For example, I was unaware of the numerous entrepreneurial concepts within the macro and micro views of entrepreneurship such as the environmental, financial, and displacement schools of thought. I merely assumed all entrepreneurs operated under the same overlying set of beliefs that tended to guide them through their ventures or undertakings. Another thing that stood out to me was the advanced planning that most entrepreneurs go through before starting on a project or start-up. They are by no means just taking a "shot in the dark" with their ideas, businesses, or products, and most of them have mapped out at least some type of blueprint about how they are going to make their venture effective in their respective markets. Finally, the discussion on the growth of gazelles truly showed me how these innovative start-ups can have a massive effect on our economy. My favorite statistic that Kuratko used showed how gazelles, which account for only 4% of total businesses, created 10.7 million new jobs, compared the entire U.S economy, which created 11.1 million new jobs. That is truly an eye-opening stat that shows the invaluable effect of successful entrepreneurs here in the U.S..

 The section of this reading that I felt was most confusing had to be the section titled: "Process Approaches to Entrepreneurship". In this section, Kuratko talked about concepts such as the "integrative approach" as well as the "dynamic states approach". These concepts were foreign to me so that could explain why I had some trouble understanding them. For example, terms such as "opportunity tension" and "value creation" are not yet fully established in my vocabulary making it difficult to fully grasp these concepts. This section was definitely the most confusing part of the reading in my opinion.

A couple of questions that I would like to ask Kuratko:

1. What do you think is the most important mental aspect of an entrepreneur? And why?

2. What is the best piece of advice you could offer to a young entrepreneur, fresh out of college?

Overall, I agreed with pretty much everything Kuratko said during this chapter, mainly because most of it is objective material. However, his explanation of entrepreneurship in general seemed to fit with the definitions that I had already had in my mind. Maybe in future chapters I won't find his writing appealing or accurate, who knows?

Until next time,

- Bryce