Entrepreneurial strategy: a choice-based approach to entrepreneurship education

Abstract

We introduce a choice-oriented approach to entrepreneurship that provides novel and direct insights into the central strategic dilemmas facing entrepreneurs. Specifically, as entrepreneurs explore an idea, they face many alternatives that cannot be pursued at once, and so must adopt (implicitly or explicitly) a process for choice, including the choice of a beachhead customer, the choice of an emerging technological trajectory, the choice of founding team and organization, and the choice of an initial commercialization strategy. Entrepreneurial strategy is the sequence of choices a founding team makes to test specific value creation and capture hypotheses when entrepreneurial experimentation requires partial commitment. The course translates this conceptual synthesis into a practical framework for entrepreneurship education and provides a deep understanding of the core strategic choices facing innovation-based entrepreneurs, a synthetic framework for the process of choosing and then implementing an entrepreneurial strategy, and the core challenges for scaling ventures over time.