Entrepreneurial start

Many of the most promising options will require significant levels of funding to proceed. The preliminary financial analysis will help estimate the cash needs to get started, but the entrepreneurial engineer s tendency toward optimism will, in this case, tend to underestimate cash needs. 

Starting a business is risky. According to the Small Business Administration, three out of four businesses fail in their first year of operation, and nine out of 10 fail within 10 years. If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, you are willing to take this risk. Also, you have the drive and persistence to keep going when things get tough. You take charge of the situation and allow your creativity to overcome the obstacles. Above all, you believe in yourself and your ability to succeed. 

Thus, it is no surprise that commercialization results are far from optimal. University research that could be converted to useful products is done not at all or done imperfectly. In a process sense, the latter stages of the development process can have very low first-pass yield. Consider as well the education process. Due to the lack of experiential understanding of the reality of the business world, students can emerge from the process essentially poorly educated. For example, as a result, those entrepreneurial graduates who start their own companies are prone to make mistakes—not just unavoidable mistakes but mistakes that could have been avoided. 

For Caltech students we decided to create another path to redress this gap between what the students leam in academia and what is required to start a company. We developed a relatively short-term but very intense business training program that would prepare them for the entrepreneurial world. 

The DELTA Rx Institute (www.deltarx.com). The DELTA Rx Institute is based at the Drake University College of Pharmacy Health Sciences. DELTA stands for Drake Entrepreneurial Leadership Tools for Advancement. The Web site provides resources on entrepreneurship, profiles pharmacy entrepreneurial leaders, and provides tools and courses that can help to get pharmacists started on the path to entrepreneurship. 

Entrepreneurial Academe Corporate labs High-tech start-ups... 

There are three basic elements to entrepreneurship in chemical production (Fig. 12.6). The first - estabhshing entrepreneurial focus - means that performance targets have to be set which are driven by the capital markets in a participative process starting from the top - that is, at the business unit or divisional level -and which follow through a transparent value-driver tree in order to determine targets for the front line (see Section 12.2.1). The desired end product is a balanced scorecard for each operational unit with a clear Hnk to the overall profitability of the business unit... 

Most radical innovations start in niche markets, communities of economic interest where the new technology solves some deeply felt problem. This is necessary because new technologies often serve customers poorly along the performance dimensions of value in mainstream markets. Radical innovations make the transition to the mainstream only after establishing a strong base in the niche. Mainstream businesses often find little of interest in these niches because they are too small or because they offer profit margins that are too narrow. Hence, niche markets are often left to the entrepreneurial venture. By contrast, incremental innovations usually fit well into mainstream markets, and market incumbents tend to develop and employ them better. 

Computers available to most computational chemists in the earliest days were large, central systems (mainframes) where users collected to read-in sets of punch cards and recover some printed output. A small revolution, which we can rightfully dub a mini revolution got its start in the early-to-mid 1970 s with the entrepreneurial development of small computing machines called minicomputers, along with low-volume, inexpensive card readers, printers, simple terminals, and disk systems. 

Some companies that value innovation may ask, "Did you ever want to start your own company " These companies want to hire entrepreneurial people who are always thinking of creative products and services. If your answer is "yes," be prepared for a follow-up question that requires you to describe your business idea. Your answer will be evaluated on its uniqueness, its relevance to the marketplace, and how well you ve thought it through. 

Operator-based maintenance began with the entrepreneurial spirit of the cottage industry in the U.S. free enterprise system. In most cases, the owners fixed the sawmills, the cotton gins, the printing presses, and the wagon wheels. Owners were the skilled crafts people working within a free enterprise culture and system. For many Americans, OEM started with Henry Ford s Model T, which came with tools—a crescent wrench, slip-joint pliers, screwdriver, and hammer, and so on—for the do-it-yourself repairs. 

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