Innovative teaching practices from USASBE. Clic here.

by Scott Shane

1. It takes a lot of money to finance a new business. Not true. The typical start-up only requires about $25,000 to get going. The successful entrepreneurs who don’t believe the myth design their businesses to work with little cash. They borrow instead of paying for things. They rent instead of buy. And they turn fixed costs into variable costs by, say, paying people commissions instead of salaries.
2. Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money. Not unless you start a computer or biotech company. Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and seventy-two percent of the companies that got VC money over the past fifteen or so years. VCs only fund about 3,000 companies per year and only about one quarter of those companies are in the seed or start-up stage. In fact, the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower. Continue reading →

Fuente: GEM

1. Un 13,4 % de la población adulta chilena entre 18 y 64 años de edad está involucrado en actividades emprendedoras en etapas iniciales. Esto significa un aumento de un 46% con respecto a la medición anterior efectuada en el año 2006.

2. Un 62% de estos emprendedores manifiestan que están en una actividad emprendedora porque buscan una oportunidad real de negocio.

3. El aumento de la actividad emprendedora en 2007, se explica fundamentalmente por un pronunciado incremento de actividades de autoempleo y también por un incremento proporcional de participación de las mujeres en actividad emprendedora.

4. El nivel de actividad emprendedora en Chile es similar a la de otros países que poseen un PIB per cápita parecido.

5. Las mediciones con la población adulta encuestada indican que existe la percepción de que Chile presenta oportunidades disponibles para iniciar un nuevo negocio o empresa. Continue reading →

by Judith Cone,
Vice President, Entrepreneurship, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

Curriculum has to be made deeper, sounder, and more consistent across the board. So instead of supporting “one-off” curriculum projects at various institutions, we are now focused on piloting and replicating true world-class coursework. For instance, we will be partnering with schools to develop and disseminate an entire new learning sequence for students. To fill a key gap in the curriculum, we are looking at refining and disseminating a very promising new approach to teaching opportunity recognition. And to spread entrepreneurship across the campus, we will help propagate some of the best new curriculum developed at the Kauffman Campuses.

Faculty development is a crucial, related issue. Many schools do not have enough qualified faculty to meet the growing student demand. We are thus intensifying efforts to recruit faculty from all disciplines-be it business, the social sciences, or any other discipline-and prepare them to teach and do research in entrepreneurship.

Continue reading →

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