Learning about the personal characteristics of entrepreneurs - and about yourself
Students in the Entrepreneurial Enterprises course complete an online questionnaire to investigate the personal characteristics of entrepreneurs. Students also learn something about themselves as a potential entrepreneur.
(Students taking the Entrepreneurial Commercialisation for New Ventures course benefit from the same approach to learn about themselves as consumers and about ways to assess potential consumers for innovative products and services.)
First, you complete an online questionnaire
You are invited to complete an online questionnaire that includes questions that have been developed and validated by international researchers.
These questions are used to develop an improved understanding of the characteristics, competencies, and behaviours of entrepreneurs.
This questionnaire takes about 15 to 20 minutes to complete, and you are asked to do this before the start of the lecture series.
You get a confidential and personalised benchmark report
Before the second lecture session, you will be sent a detailed 11-page benchmark report that shows your responses, compared with those of the whole class.
This report is confidential to you, and you will not have to show it to anyone else.
This image shows the research model that is used in this exercise. It includes entrepreneurial values, entrepreneurial attitudes, entrepreneurial intentions and entrepreneurial behaviour, with moderating factors including entrepreneurial self-efficacy, and the influence of others.
This image also shows the overview summary chart of entrepreneurial values.
This image shows the details of results that you receive. It displays your response for each question, the class average (benchmark) for that question, and the standard deviation in the responses for that question.
This information provides a valuable basis for understanding your own responses, as well as the profile for the whole class.
You will gain personal insights
The report is used as the basis for discussion in the session that deals with "the entrepreneurial mind", and we do a number of exercises in the class that help you get insights into your own values, attitudes, capabilities and intentions, relative to the other students in the class. This will give you food for thought, and will challenge you to think about developing your own entrepreneurial characteristics.
You will also learn about theories and models relating to entrepreneurial characteristics
This approach is a way of bringing to life leading-edge research into the personal characteristics of entrepreneurs. The research model that is discussed is one that is used in current research in this field, and the measures that are reviewed are ones that many researchers are using to gain a better understanding of "what makes entrepreneurs tick?"
We also use this report in a similar manner in the session dealing with opportunity recognition.
This image shows a research model that is used to explore what entrepreneurs do (their behaviour) when they look for an identify a business opportunity.
This exercise also gives you an idea of the kind of research that University staff are carrying out with entrepreneurs.
This is the type of research that you might experiment with in an Honours year, and carry out for a Ph.D.
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