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Guide License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Getting Started
Welcome to the Entrepreneurship Research Guide. This guide is arranged into core components that play a key role in forming or in the process of a start-up.
Research in these areas is far-reaching, coming from a variety of sources, including library databases and reputable free sources of information (such as government agencies, competitors, and industry associations). To save yourself time and frustration, it's important to think about the information you need before starting your research.
To help you form an effective research strategy, the business librarians have developed two tools:
- Jump-Start Your ResearchA step-by-step guide to planning your secondary research that you can e-mail to yourself and/or a business librarian.
- Research TipsTips for searching databases effectively and for realistic research.
Books
Entrepreneurship by
Based on the world-renowned Babson Entrepreneurship program, this new text emphasizes practice and learning through action. Students will walk away from this text with the entrepreneurial mindset, skillset and toolset that can be applied to startups as well as organizations of all kinds. Suitable for students from a variety of academic backgrounds.
ISBN: 9781483383521Publication Date: 2017-01-25
Innovator's DNA, Updated, with a New Preface by
A new classic, recommended by leaders and media around the world In this bestselling book, authors Jeff Dyer (Innovation Capital and The Innovator's Method), Hal Gregersen (Questions Are the Answer), and Clayton M. Christensen (The Innovator's Dilemma, The Innovator's Solution, and How Will You Measure Your Life?) build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact. By identifying the winning behaviors of the world's best innovators--from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Tesla, and Salesforce--Dyer, Gregersen, and Christensen outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Through real-world stories, the authors show you how to evaluate and develop your own innovator's "DNA code," including advice for how you can use the five skills to generate ideas, collaborate with colleagues to implement them, and sharpen your organization's competitive edge by building innovation skills into its culture. This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company's stock price--an innovation premium--which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization's people, processes, and guiding philosophies. This book shows you how. Now updated with a new preface and fresh examples, The Innovator's DNA is more than ever the essential resource for individuals, managers, and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.
ISBN: 9781633697201Publication Date: 2019-06-04
The Art of the Start by
A new product, a new service, a new company, a new division, a new anything - where there's a will, Kawasaki shows the way with his essential steps to launching one's dreams.
ISBN: 1591840562Publication Date: 2004-09-09
The Startup Owner's Manual by
Now a decade after The Four Steps to the Epiphany sparked the Lean Startup revolution, comes its sequel... The Startup Owner's Manual. The Manual incorporates 10 years of learning and best practices that have swept the startup world. It incorporates the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses, provides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus physical products, offers a wealth of detailed instruction on how to get, keep, and grow customers recognizing the different techniques for web and physical channels and teaches a "new math" for startups: "metrics that matter for fueling growth." The Startup Owner's Manual is a step-by-step, near-encyclopedic reference manual or "how to" for building a successful, scalable startup. Want to know what to do the first, week, month or year? What's the right distribution channel for your product? How to get traffic to your web site? ...and how to activate customers or users on arrival? Who are the right "first customers," and why? ...plus many more great tips in nearly 500 pages, complete with index, glossary, and Customer Development Checklists. It's the indispensible reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.
ISBN: 9780984999309Publication Date: 2012-03-01
The Lean Startup by
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs--in companies of all sizes--a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
ISBN: 9780307887894Publication Date: 2011-09-13
Introduction to Social Entrepreneurship by
Social entrepreneurship is a revolution occurring around the world today. People from all walks of life are developing and implementing innovative, effective, and sustainable solutions in response to social and environmental challenges. These solutions include products, services, and interventions brought to market by new startups and existing orga
ISBN: 9780429257711Publication Date: 2016-05-03
The Founder's Dilemmas by
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.
ISBN: 9780691149134Publication Date: 2012-03-25
Building Your Dream: A Canadian Guide to Starting Your Own Business by
Good/Mayhew, Building Your Dream brings a practical, hands-on approach to Small Business and Entrepreneurship. Good focuses on start-up versus managing a small business and walks the students through the fundamental 11-stage approach that is involved in starting a business.
ISBN: 9781259106859Publication Date: 2017
Books: Tools & Methods
Business Model Generation by
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 "Business Model Canvas" practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition. Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to "the business model generation!"
ISBN: 9780470876411Publication Date: 2010-07-13- The Startup Owner's Manual by
Now a decade after The Four Steps to the Epiphany sparked the Lean Startup revolution, comes its sequel... The Startup Owner's Manual. The Manual incorporates 10 years of learning and best practices that have swept the startup world. It incorporates the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses, provides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus physical products, offers a wealth of detailed instruction on how to get, keep, and grow customers recognizing the different techniques for web and physical channels and teaches a "new math" for startups: "metrics that matter for fueling growth." The Startup Owner's Manual is a step-by-step, near-encyclopedic reference manual or "how to" for building a successful, scalable startup. Want to know what to do the first, week, month or year? What's the right distribution channel for your product? How to get traffic to your web site? ...and how to activate customers or users on arrival? Who are the right "first customers," and why? ...plus many more great tips in nearly 500 pages, complete with index, glossary, and Customer Development Checklists. It's the indispensible reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.
ISBN: 9780984999309Publication Date: 2012-03-01
The Decision Book by
An updated edition of the internationalbestseller that distills into a single volumethe fifty best decision-making models. Every day, we face the same questions: How do I make the right decision? How can I work more efficiently? And, on a more personal level, what do I want? This updated edition of the international bestseller distills into a single volume the fifty best decision-making models used in MBA courses, and elsewhere, that will help you tackle these important questions. In minutes you can become conversant with: The Long Tail * The Maslow Pyramids * SWOT Analysis * The Rubber Band Model * The Prisoner's Dilemma * Cognitive Dissonance * The Eisenhower Matrix * Conflict Resolution * Flow * The Personal Potential Trap * and many more. Stylish and compact, this little book is a powerful asset. Whether you need to plan a presentation, assess someone's business idea, or get to know yourself better, this unique guide--bursting with useful visual tools--will help you simplify any problem and make the best decision.
ISBN: 0393652378Publication Date: 2018-05-08
Head First Data Analysis by
Today, interpreting data is a critical decision-making factor for businesses and organizations. If your job requires you to manage and analyze all kinds of data, turn to Head First Data Analysis, where you'll quickly learn how to collect and organize data, sort the distractions from the truth, find meaningful patterns, draw conclusions, predict the future, and present your findings to others. Whether you're a product developer researching the market viability of a new product or service, a marketing manager gauging or predicting the effectiveness of a campaign, a salesperson who needs data to support product presentations, or a lone entrepreneur responsible for all of these data-intensive functions and more, the unique approach in Head First Data Analysis is by far the most efficient way to learn what you need to know to convert raw data into a vital business tool. You'll learn how to: Determine which data sources to use for collecting information Assess data quality and distinguish signal from noise Build basic data models to illuminate patterns, and assimilate new information into the models Cope with ambiguous information Design experiments to test hypotheses and draw conclusions Use segmentation to organize your data within discrete market groups Visualize data distributions to reveal new relationships and persuade others Predict the future with sampling and probability models Clean your data to make it useful Communicate the results of your analysis to your audience Using the latest research in cognitive science and learning theory to craft a multi-sensory learning experience, Head First Data Analysis uses a visually rich format designed for the way your brain works, not a text-heavy approach that puts you to sleep.
ISBN: 0596153937Publication Date: 2009-08-18
Entrepreneurship as an Industry
Sources for learning about entrepreneurship and start-ups:
- Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM Consortium)Global, national and special topic reports.
- Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial ActivityReports on U.S. startup activity as well as articles on trends, indicators of success, demographics, etc.
- CrunchBaseCrowd-sourced data on startup funding & investment activity and acquisitions .
Community Members and Alumni
Are you an aspiring entrepreneur not affiliated with UBC or UBC Sauder? Then check out the Small Business Accelerator.
- Small Business AcceleratorA free, online resource for business information and tools for secondary market research for BC businesses and entrepreneurs.
Reach out to Aleha McCauley, our Community Engagement Librarian (Business Services) at aleha.mccauley@ubc.ca if you would like targeted entrepreneurial research support.
In addition, alumni have access to online journal articles, the UBC Library website provides more information about services available to alumni.