The Business Plan has been the unquestioned cornerstone of entrepreneurial education. The Plan would serve as the roadmap for actions, the tool for raising capital. Until now. 

Recent research has given birth to a radically different approach to new venture creation and entrepreneurial success.  “Effectual Reasoning” presents a revolutionary new path for entrepreneurs.  There is no business plan.  It’s all about, who you know, what you know, and finding incremental steps to success.  In some ways, the less you know, the better your chances are! 

In this dynamic webinar, a process with its underlying philosophy will be described that can be executed by virtually anyone.  It will be especially relevant to students, recent graduates, and first-time entrepreneurs.  It’s a simple, step by step “how to” approach to finding a business opportunity and starting a business.  It is based upon the accumulated experience of real entrepreneurs who have started real businesses.  This unique program is currently being sponsored by Bank Santander for use by thousands of students in Latin America who are learning a new approach to entrepreneurship.

The webinar will be given by Bob Caspe, serial entrepreneur, Founder, CEO and Chairman of three high technology companies and full-time adjunct lecturer at Babson College. Mr. Caspe is the creator and author of this radically different approach to business creation that is gaining international recognition.

Friday, October 1
12 p.m. - 1 p.m. EST
Cost is $10.  This fee is non-refundable.

Registration will close on Wednesday, September 29th.
A confirmation email with log-in instructions to access the
webinar wil be forwarded to all registrants on Thursday, September 30th.

Sponsored by Babson Alumni and Friends Network.

Register at https://secure.imodules.com/s/651/getconnected.aspx?sid=651&gid=1&pgid=1519&cid=3296

It’s barely a month since the publication of Mary Gentile’s Giving Voice to Values:  How to Speak Your Mind When You Know What’s Right, but the response from business professionals, educators, and academics from around the world has been overwhelming.  Hear what Mary has to say about it:

In the current issue of Babson Executive Education’s Babson Insight, Dr. Nan S. Langowitz, Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship looks at navigating adversity in turbulent times. The past few years have been unusually tough for most business leaders. But a growing body of Babson research shows that the entrepreneurial leadership exhibited by the CEOs of many small and mid-sized companies can serve as a model for how any manager can navigate and thrive during adversity. 

For the full article:  http://execed.babson.edu/thought-leadership/navigating-adversity.aspx

Friederike Welter, Candida G Brush and Anne de Bruin have received an Outstanding Paper Award for their paper “A gender-aware framework for women’s entrepreneurship.”

The award was given by the annual Emerald Literati Networks Awards for Excellence, a part of Emerald Group Publishing which is the world’s leading scholarly publisher of journals and books in business and management.

Despite the growing number of women entrepreneurs, they are understudied. The paper, published in the International Journal of Gender and Entrepreneurship 2009, offers a new gender-aware framework providing a springboard for future research that can begin to mitigate this gender gap.  Read more.

Professor Dan Isenberg of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project writes in The Economist: “I want to be the first to advocate the ignorance-based economy. Exhortations by public officials everywhere to build knowledge-based economies have skyrocketed in popularity since the OECD first published its manifesto in 1996, accruing a whopping 40,000 articles on Google scholar alone. Unfortunately, like many sound bites, this one has more flavor than nutrition. As I help societies around the world increase their levels of entrepreneurship, I’ve found the “knowledge-based economy” mantra, ubiquitous as it is among public leaders everywhere, has become empty for three reasons.”  Read more here.

In the current issue of Babson Insight, Professor Tom Davenport explains how analytics are key to making better decisions and taking the right actions. Sometimes intuitive and experience-based decisions work out well, but often they will go astray. Here are several assets and capabilities that organizations need to succeed with analytics initiatives.

http://execed.babson.edu/thought-leadership/putting-analytics-to-work.aspx

This week the Center for Women’s Business Research launched its latest study into the ongoing question of why women don’t grow their businesses.  The findings from this survey will be presented on September 29, 2010  at the National Women’s Business Council’s Summit on “Accessing Capital and Financing Growth, ” a key session of WIPP’s (Women Impacting Public Policy) 2010 Annual Leadership Conference.  The findings will also be shared directly with the survey participants through the W-Biz survey panel.  And, of course, blogging will follow.  The fundamental issue is whether women businesses stay smaller because they prefer them to be smaller, or whether there are hurdles to a desired state of growth. 

The survey is being conducted through the Center’s W-Biz Insight panel, a two year old project to provide rapid and actionable research findings to support the advancement of women business owners.  Please help spread the word about the opportunity to participate in the panel!  All women business owners of any size – employees or no employees – are encouraged to participate.  Just head to W-Biz Insight — click here.  If you are a new panelist you’ll first see the participation panel, finish that, and then shortly will receive the invitation to join the new growth survey.  Our team is very much looking forward to hearing from you.

Remember, it’s W-Biz Insight — click here.

Professor Patricia Greene
F.W. Olin Distinguished Chair in Entrepreneurship

In Babson Executive Education’s latest issue of Babson Insight, Professors Joseph Weintraub and Jay Rao discuss the building blocks necessary to nurture a culture of innovation.  Take their test.

http://tinyurl.com/2e4xxpy

The financial crisis peaked in September 2008. That was when Lehman Brothers collapsed in a $639 billion bankruptcy and the short-term financial markets seized up with terror so great that people who thought they could hold up their savings in money market funds lost that faith.

Two years later, we’ve backed away from the brink but little has been done to keep it from happening again. The panic in the financial markets has not gone away. It’s taken a different form — driving gold prices up 56% from $805 an ounce on September 3, 2008 to $1,253 September 3, 2010. Of course, that panic will not lead to economic revival — to get that we need a new, business-productivity-boosting technology.

A Brief History of The Financial Crisis

While the stirrings of the financial crisis dated back to the summer of 2006, it took two years for it to reach its peak in September 2008. That summer was when subprime mortgage issuers started to collapse. I remember it well because in a December 18, 2006 post on DailyFinance’s sister site, BloggingStocks, I recommended selling short shares of sub-prime lender Novastar Financial (NOVS) at $106 — by September 3, 2010 the stock was trading at $0.66.

At the risk of repeating the obvious, sub-prime mortgages were the oxygen for the bubble of hot financial air that began bursting in 2008. That’s because subprime mortgages were the raw materials in a range of financial sausages — known as Mortgage-Backed Securities (MBS) and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs) — that Wall Street foisted onto yield-hungry institutional investors. And thanks to the AAA-ratings that ratings agencies supplied for those financial sausages, the institutions were free to buy them.

We all know what happened next. Borrowers who got the sub-prime mortgages could not make their payments since they did not really have as much income as they had stated on their loan applications. Worse, the borrowers could no longer sell their properties at a profit to pay off the loans.

Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers whose balance sheets were loaded up with these financial sausages lost the trust of the short-term lending markets that provided their financial oxygen. Meanwhile, as I posted on September 18, 2008 in BloggingStocks, hedge funds were able to withdraw their money from these Wall Street banks while placing bets on their collapse by selling short their shares and buying Credit Default Swaps whose value rose along with the risk that these Wall Street banks would not be able to make bond payments.

By September 2008, when Lehman Brothers went into bankruptcy, the money markets were seizing up. Two measures of that were the TED spread, which counts the difference between three-month (London Interbank Offered Rate) Libor and the three-month Treasury rate, and the Libor-Overnight Indexed Swap (OIS) spread. As I posted, on September 30, 2008 the TED spread was near a record 3.38% (it was 1.1% in August 2008). And the Libor-OIS spread was a record 2.46% (it was 0.08% in September 2007).

Some money market funds broke the buck — meaning that their price per share — which investors depended on to remain at $1 – fell below that level because some of them owned Lehman Brothers commercial paper.

Recovery, But Fear Has Not Left the Building

Things in the money market world have recovered nicely since then. On September 3, 2010, the TED spread was 0.17% and the LIBOR-OIS spread was 0.11%.

But fear has not left the building. Instead it has taken the form of investors buying gold on the assumption of massive inflation around the corner. As I wrote on August 17, strangely, investors are also piling into corporate bonds — a bet that will only pay off if deflation is the rule and will decline in value if the gold bugs are right.

Meanwhile, the economy is at a crossroads. The good news is that job losses are way down from the nearly 800,000 lost in January 2009 at the peak of the recession. Corporate profits are high and cash balances at $1.84 trillion are at near record levels. Moreover, the economy has been growing since the summer of 2009.

Unfortunately, if left to its own devices the economy appears poised for stagnation. While consumers are borrowing as much as they can from credit cards; business demand for credit appears to be down as their balance sheets strengthen and banks cut lending to them.

With 70% of economic growth coming from consumer spending, it is hard to see how that spending will rise enough to get the economy moving again until businesses start to hire enough workers to take up the slack from the 8.4 million who have lost their jobs since the recession began in December 2007.

Reviving America’s Innovation Engine

To get to that point, the economy would need to be growing faster than 2.5% and creating at least 300,000 jobs a month. How could we achieve that? One way is to go back to what I think of as America’s greatest strength — its ability to turn new ideas into robust entrepreneurial ecosystems. That’s a topic Professor Srini Rangan and I addressed in our June 2010 book, Capital Rising: How Capital Flows Are Changing Business Systems All Over the World.

We could achieve economic growth if we could create such ecosystems that would draw capital investment from the corporate sector into new technologies that boost business productivity. We achieved that goal in the 1960s (mainframes), 1970s (minicomputers), 1980s (networked PCs), and 1990s (Internet).

The question of the moment is: “What is the powerful new idea to spur such capital investment in the 2010s?”

Adjunct Lecturer Peter S. Cohan