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Intrepreneurship Course
Notes
1. Executive Summary
The purpose of this class
is to teach technical professionals the fundamental skills and behaviors
needed to run a major development project in a large company, or to
successfully start or to run a new business venture. The material falls into three basic
groups: Understanding of
business issues, having the personal skills to make-it-happen, and
organization and cultural issues.
The
basis for the development of the "people" side of the material is
the concept of “The Cornerstones of Competence”, i.e.:
1.
One must
have a core competence.
For a technical person/business, this is often your profession or
your product.
2.
One must be
able to sell this competence.
This includes the ability to effectively communicate your ideas, and
to rally money and team behind your ideas.
3.
One must
have someone to sell it to. One
must have the skills to develop and maintain business relationships. These skills can be taught, even to
engineers. There are both
external relationships (customers), and internal relationships (team,
gov't).
4.
One must
deliver this competence you sold to someone, to his or her
expectations. If you do not deliver
to your customer’s expectations, you loose their trust, and
don’t get a chance again. This is Project Management.
5.
You must
have the motivation to reach the goal. These motivations drive the
behaviors that are needed for success.
The skills and behaviors
learned in this course apply equally to entrepreneurs and intrepreneurs,
i.e. people who can "make things happen". The recent interest in
entrepreneurship, and the resulting study of this by major universities,
helps yield insight into what makes people who can
"make-it-happen" tick, and how to spread these skills to
others. I am pleased to be able
to participate in these efforts at MIT.
The material included is taken from a variety of
sources, which I have collected over the last 18 years, and have used
successfully in building a business, and in developing successful
management. The material forms the basis of 2 courses I teach at MIT. Most of the information is collected
from published sources. Some is
unique to this course. I have
organized some of the material into a set of simple tools that can be used
to solve seemingly complex issues, with amazing results.
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617-592-8379
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