The entrepreneurial method

17 December 2012. What makes businessmen entrepreneurs? Have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Steve Jobs, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Richard Branson of Virgin Galactics simply been lucky? Are they magicians? Super-entrepreneurs who change our lives?

The magic of successful entrepreneurs is more seeming than being, as entrepreneurship research has shown. We all have entrepreneurial potential, as the second animation video in the “Little Green Bags” series of short films demonstrates.

Abandoning the myths of entrepreneurship
Successful entrepreneurs are not necessarily male university dropouts and surreptitious geniuses. The entrepreneur whom we send on her way in our animation film is a woman and neither a visionary nor a university dropout. Also, she does not have much money, nor does she have a brilliant idea which she unerringly implements. And yet she is able to master uncertainty, for she makes use of the entrepreneurial method: On the basis of who you are, what you know and whom you know, you set several possible goals and define an affordable loss.

An entrepreneur gets allies on board and speaks openly about his or her ideas. This exchange generates further perspectives – co-creation is on its way. You learn how to deal with uncertainty, and those who fail do so early enough. Here, too, the motto “practice makes perfect” applies. “The entrepreneurial methods helps you to turn the wheel of fortune more often – and thus also guides our entrepreneur in a successful direction,” says Dietmar Grichnik. He teaches and conducts research at the Institute of Technology Management (ITEM-HSG) and supervises the HSG Entrepreneurship Campus.

Digital bite of knowledge
The HSG video series “Little Green Bags” invites people to find out more about the topics of entrepreneurship, corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability. All three topics are debating points in society, the economy and politics and are therefore also an important component of research and teaching at the University of St.Gallen. In the wake of academic seminars with a lunch snack, the so-called “Brown Bag Lunches”, the video series “Little Green Bags” offers digital bites of knowledge.

The series was launched by the Institute for Business Ethics (IWE-HSG) in October 2012 with an animation film about CSR. The next film, on sustainability and the management of renewable energies, will appear in spring 2013. The films are produced in cooperation with the Zurich animation studio Zense and film director Andri Hinnen, himself a graduate of the University of St.Gallen. The Academic Director of the animation film series is Prof. Dr. Thomas Beschorner, Director of the Institute for Business Ethics at the HSG. 

Photo: University of St.Gallen (HSG) / Zense