Week 12 Reading Reflection

Hey everyone,

This post is dedicated to this week's reading reflection, which comes from our Entrepreneurship book written by Donald F. Kuratko.

One of the things that surprised me in this week's reading was the discussion of the SWOT analysis. I have never heard of this concept before, but I really appreciated the fact that it weighed the prospects of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. I feel that if one has a firm grasp on all of these concepts, their venture will be more successful and they will have better awareness of the internal and external factors confronting them. Also, I did not fully realize the extent of the overlap between entrepreneurial actions and strategic actions. The figure 13.2 on page 477 presents a venn diagram that shows how both of these actions produce Innovation, Networking, Growth, and so forth. Many people, including myself, undervalue the strength and importance of strategy and planning when discussing entrepreneurship.

The part of the reading that was most confusing to me was the section title: Managing Paradox and Contradiction. I felt like this section was trying to compare these different forms of running a company, when really they should have been talking about within the context of a business and not just against one another. I feel like there is no way to truly compare these without any context of the company or entrepreneurial situation.

Two questions I would like to ask the author:

#1. If your company was low innovation low risk, would it really be worth it to perhaps invest greater resources to increase innovation?

#2. What is the single most important factor that prevents a company from hitting a growth wall?

Once again, I did not really find anything that I did not agree with. Kuratko writes so objectively that it is hard to find points to really disagree with, especially since so many of these concepts are relatively new to me.