| What
Motivates Women Entrepreneurs? Factors Influencing Their Motivation
-- Sujata
Mukherjee
The
field of entrepreneurship is characterized by competition, financial gain and
independence, and the socio-economic setting provides a base for individuals to
venture into entrepreneurship. Individuals perform the entrepreneurial role because
of a desire to achieve, and individuals with a high need for achievement venture
into enterprise building, whether small or large. This paper presents findings
on the reasons why women from the low-income group venture into business and what
motivates them to do so. The analysis is based on primary data collected from
two districts of Maharashtra. The paper also examines the basic factors that have
a potential to influence the decisions taken by women engaged in entrepreneurial
activities. ©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Entrepreneurship:
A Study of Its Characteristics
-- Anand
Agrawal and Sunil Bhardwaj
Entrepreneurship
has social as well as economic value for the nation. The paper deals with entrepreneurship
on conceptual basis, and deals with its numerous definitions and the factors which
lead to entrepreneurship in the society. It also discusses the personality characteristics
present in the persons that make them successful entrepreneurs. The paper has
practical implications for designing courses in entrepreneurship, which may help
in creating a conducive environment for the development of entrepreneurship and
the emergence of entrepreneurs. ©
2006 IUP . All Rights Reserved.
Social
Entrepreneurship: A Grounded Model Based on Pro-social Behavior
-- Nachiket
Bhawe,
Trilok Kumar Jain and Vishal K Gupta
Traditional theories
of entrepreneurship have been about risk-oriented profit-seeking individuals who
identify market opportunities and exploit them to earn profits. Though useful
to understand a large part of entrepreneurial activities in modern economies,
the focus on profit as the underlying motive of entrepreneurs is not helpful in
understanding the activities of social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurship
refers to the creation of viable socioeconomic structures, relations, institutions,
organizations and practices that yield and sustain social benefits (Fowler, 2000).
Extant entrepreneurship research offers little guidance to understand the motivations,
mechanisms and outcomes that are central to social entrepreneurship. In this paper,
the authors attempt to advance understanding in this area by developing a framework
that is grounded in the theory of prosocial behavior and validated by field observations
of social entrepreneurs in Western India. This framework of social entrepreneurship
developed from grounded theory methods such as semi-structured interviews and
document analysis with social entrepreneurs from nine pioneering social organizations
incorporates both behavioral as well as situational factors. ©
2006 Nachiket Bhawe, Trilok Kumar Jain and Vishal K Gupta. Reprinted with permission.
Inequality
and Entrepreneurial Risk-taking of Organizations
-- Liema
Davidovich,
Sibylle Heilbrunn and Avraham Polovin
The purpose of this
paper is to investigate the impact of differential-oriented organizational culture
versus collective-oriented organizational culture on the distribution of the organizational
risk-taking level. More specifically, the authors investigate the relation between
the level of inequality in organizations and the risk-taking propensity concerning
new venture creation. According to the portfolio theory, there is a positive relationship
between the expected return and risk. The conventional opinion states that non-existence
of the relation between income and rewards (as existing in egalitarian economies)
causes a decrease in the risk-taking propensity of entrepreneurship. Without denying
the reasoning behind the conventional thought, the authors claim that their results
support a counterpoint to the convention. Namely, inequality aversion may reduce
and even reverse the negative impact of egalitarian economy on motivation for
the risky efforts. A sample of 58 Kibbutzim was investigated, out of which 36
underwent processes of organizational change towards increasing individualism
between the years 1997 and 2004, whereas the remaining 22 continued the traditional
collective-oriented model. The authors gathered data of entrepreneurial activities
in the Kibbutzim and divided them into groups in terms of operational risk level.
In addition, demographic, economic and financial data of the Kibbutzim served
as independent variables. Comparison of differential-oriented Kibbutzim and collective-oriented
Kibbutzim in 2004 reveals a difference of distribution of operational risk level
between the two organizational cultures: the more collective-oriented cultures
show a higher degree of risk-taking. The proportion of risky entrepreneurship
was higher in the egalitarian organizations. The implications of this study will
enable policymakers to better understand the economical impacts of entrepreneurial
policy caused by organizational change. The added value of this paper is the insight
of an existing trade-off in the marketplace between risk aversion and inequality
aversion. Suppression of inequality enables the inequality-averse person to assume
higher risk levels. ©
2006 Liema Davidovich, Sibylle Heilbrunn and Avraham Polovin. Reprinted with permission.
Case
Study
Pete
Kight's CheckFree: Pioneering Online Bill Payments in the US
-- Abdul Samad and Sumit Kumar Chaudhuri
Since the 1990s, e-commerce
has transformed tangible money into a piece of information, which can drive the
finances of the corporate world thorugh the click of a mouse. Pete Kight captured
this opportunity to pioneer a system to provide electronic bill payment and presentment
(EBPP) services to his customers. He removed the hassles of writing checks, paste
envelops and postage for paying bills by establishing CheckFree in 1981. CheckFree
is an online service provider for e-commerce and payment services, which became
the biggest player in the industry by 1993. In 2004-2005, CheckFree had annual
sales of $757 million. ©
2006 IBS Case Development Center. All Rights Reserved. | 
