Reflections of Entrepreneurship

Founder, Dr. Christopher Haggarty-Weir.

Tonight I have been reading up on strategic management and entrepreneurship. I thought I would share something for my fellow entrepreneurs out there. Here are 5 traits of entrepreneurial orientation and how they relate to myself and my firm; would be good to hear from others about how they fit into the below:

1. Autonomy; Bringing about ideas and seeing them through. I had a vision of developing an effective, bespoke, and timely training program to train STEM professionals in the fundamentals of business; we now have 3 versions of this with a 4th in development.

2. Competitive aggressiveness; Actively challenging the competition rather than trying to avoid them. Our main competition remains universities and other consulting firms, but we take them head-on by quickly responding to actual market demand and using competitive pricing so no one needs to go without.

3. Innovativeness; The tendency to pursue novel ideas. Our mini-MBA programs were born from this mentality. No one was offering inexpensive business training with all case studies aimed at the client's precise industry sector to ensure maximum engagement. I made use of my variety of discipline backgrounds (from chemistry to medicine) and those of my team to cover the tech sector. Next we aim to replicate this with a bespoke intellectual property training program.

4. Proactiveness; Anticipate and act on future opportunities rather than relying on an existing service/product base. Thanks to the excellent team I have, we have started looking into offering services around data anonymization testing. We fell this is a growing future need, especially as more privacy concerns are being raised by citizens, corporations, and governments around the world.

5. Risk-Taking; Ability to assume risk rather than being too cautious. I believe very much in taking calculated risks. This is why we have been doing a significant amount of due diligence on regulatory and technical requirements in data anonymization testing, before blindly entering that market sector.

So fellow entrepreneurs, where do you fit in and what are some of your examples?

[Also, if you are interested in our mini-MBA program for scientists, contact us at dr.chris@haggarty-weirconsulting.com]