What is Technopreneurship?

What is technological entrepreneurship?

• It is simply entrepreneurship in a technology-intensive context.
• It is a process of merging technology prowess and entrepreneurial talent and skills.

Technology + Entrepreneurship = Technopreneurship

The technological entrepreneurship continuum:

Who is the technopreneur?

• A person who destroys the existing economic order (creative destruction) by introducing new products and services by creating new forms of organizations and by exploiting new raw materials. (Schumpeter, 1934)
• Someone who perceives an opportunity and creates an organization to pursue it.
• A person who undertakes risks (by creating an enterprise or business) that has the chance of profit (or success). Technopreneurs distinguish themselves through their ability to accumulate and manage knowledge, as well as their ability to mobilize resources to achieve a specified business or social goal.(Kuemmerle, 2002)
• The technopreneur is a bold, imaginative deviator from established business methods and practices who constantly seeks the opportunity to commercialize new products, technologies, processes, and arrangements. (Baumol, 2002)
• The technopreneur distinguishes logic from tradition, tradition from prejudice, prejudice from common sense and common sense from nonsense while integrating a variety of ideas from diverse groups and disciplines. (Manuel Cereijo, 2002)
• Technopreneurs are skilled in applied creativity, thrive in response to challenge, and look for unconventional solutions. They experience challenges, create visions for solutions, build stories that explain their visions, and then act to be part of the solution. They forge new paths and risk failure, but persistently seek success. (Dorf and Byers, 2005)

What is entrepreneurship?

• A way of thinking and acting that is opportunity obsessed, holistic in approach and leadership balanced for the purpose of wealth creation. (Bobson’s definition)
• Entrepreneurship is creative destruction. Dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating entrepreneur, rather than equilibrium and optimization, is the norm of a healthy economy and the central reality of economic theory and practice. (Schumpeter, 1934)
• The entrepreneur searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. (Drucker, 1985)
• Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to the resources currently under one’s control. (Stevenson)

What is technopreneurship?

• Creating the “New” and destroying the “Old”.

- New knowledge

- New products

- New processes

- New services

- New markets

- New business models

- New raw materials

Entrepreneurial process vs. Technopreneurial process:

• Entrepreneurial process

Opportunity Analysis

↳ Business Planning

       ↳ Gathering Resources

              ↳ Implementation

                     ↳ Scaling and Harvesting

• Technopreneurial process

Idea Generation

↳ Idea Screening

       ↳ Concept Testing

              ↳ Business Analysis

                     ↳ Prototyping

                            ↳ Test Marketing

                                   ↳ Commercialization

                                          ↳ Monitoring & Evaluation

Technopreneur and the Economy:

• Technopreneurs as agents of economic growth.

Technopreneur and the Economy:

• Three elements of the intellectual capital.

1. Human capital = the skills, capabilities, and knowledge of the firm’s people.

2. Organizational capital = the patents, technologies, processes, databases, and networks.

3. Social capital = the quality of the relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners.