Enterprise in Action: A Guide To Entrepreneurship

Chapter 10

Beyond the Box

From a pavement café in Oviedo, northern Spain, I once spotted a T-shirt with the legend:

Crees en el amor a primera vista,

O tengo que pasar otra vez?

Which I think translates as:

Do you believe in love at first sight,

Or do I have to go round again?

When it comes to writing a book’s final chapter I tend to the ‘love at first sight’ view. Readers who, as one hopes, have found it helpful and convincing do not need to ‘go round again’ and those who have not are unlikely to be won over with a meticulous summary of all that has been said before.

So instead I am going for a very brief review of the key ideas that have been explored in the book but followed by a new case that brings them together nicely.

CEO: a new twist

This book has majored on three key ideas: Change, Experience, and Originality, whose initial letters yield the mnemonic CEO. All three have been conceived in a broad and inclusive way.

Change has been depicted as every species of change that facilitates business creation or impacts on business development. The treatment of change has not been restricted to the more conventional categories of technological and regulatory change, though examples of these have been offered and discussed.

A simple moral emerges. It is the exploitation of change that gets many entrepreneurs started, but an adaptive response to subsequent change that is essential for company survival and indeed for further development.

The essence of experience is, of course, ...