Decision Making Process

Table of contents

Preface

Entrepreneurship in today’s society
Introduction
Why is entrepreneurship relevant for today’s society?
Entrepreneurship creates values for society
Entrepreneurship sets paragons for society
Conclusion
References

Decision Making Process
What is a Decision Tree?
My Decision Tree
Reflexion
References

Preface

The text at hand was written as two assignments for a summer school course at the University of Lincoln in 2010.

The first text is about entrepreneurship. It was written for the course of Kevin Blanchard in the first week of the summer school. It tries to show the importance of entrepreneurs in today’s society.

The second text is about decision making for the second week of the summer school. This course was taught by Steven Marshall. The text tries to show with an example how decision trees work and if they could be applied in more than business decision making.

Introduction

This essay tries to examine what an entrepreneur is and tries to discuss the relevance of entrepreneurship in today’s society.

The question is on what ability one can decide if someone is an entrepreneur or not. And what is the difference between an entrepreneur and an innovator.

There is actually accordance about the core ability an entrepreneur should have (Hirsch et al., 2008). The prime attitude is the ability to spot profitable opportunities (Kirzner, 1973). In contrast Schumpeter says an entrepreneur sees a problem or isn’t satisfied with the situation and than he is looking for a solution for this problem, he has a vision of making think better that they are. An entrepreneur spot new opportunities out of old ones, Schumpeter says (Schumpeter, 1934) The second ability an entrepreneur should have is to be a creative person, in sense of Schumpeter who said that an entrepreneur should bring chance through the adaption of new technology (Schumpeter, 1934). The entrepreneur asked himself the question what kind of new thing is necessary to solve his particular problem. As a third ability an entrepreneur should be someone who sees risks, evaluate them and after that take the risks (Venkataraman, 1997). Furthermore should an entrepreneur accept a level of uninsurable risks (Casson, 1982) because one cannot beware of one hundred per cent of all risks might happen. After that as the last ability an entrepreneur should be driven by a reward in the end of the day (Knight, 1921). That might be a high income with his new ideas or the freedom of self-employment, i.e. to decide when he works and how much he works. If someone is driven by a certain reward in his mind he will work hard in the beginning of the venture to achieve this reward.

One can say that all abilities mentioned above can also describe an innovator. But what distinguishes an entrepreneur from an innovator? The answer might be quite simple. Whereas an innovator falls in love with his inventions and will only reluctantly modify them an entrepreneur falls in love with his new venture and will do almost everything to ensure its survival and growth (Hirsch et al., 2008). That is the main difference between an innovator and an entrepreneur (Hirsch et al., 2008).

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