Babson Build

Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® best describes the mindset and behaviors of entrepreneurs who can think and act not only as a rational scientist, but also as someone who can lead and navigate creatively in uncertain environments. Entrepreneurs understand that the traditional scientific method of analyzing and then acting does not always work when faced with business problems in an environment that has high levels of uncertainty. It requires a mode of thinking long popularized by serial entrepreneurs and innovators—to act, learn, and build. This is the essence of ET&A™—to act your way into tackling unknown problems with unknown solutions.

Globally, the most common forms of financing entrepreneurial ventures are family and friends. While those are great starting points, these forms of funding do not really bring in other key resources—access to talent, business networks, and mentoring. Moreover, the ability to raise external financing often validates the idea and converts the idea into an opportunity. Most importantly, this sets the entrepreneurial team on a disciplined path toward growth and perhaps an eventual exit. Understanding this journey is key to building scalable businesses.

Innovation is very democratic. Startup firms with very little resources are able to disrupt incumbent firms with lots of resources. We have seen this happen across almost all industries. Understanding the nuances of this phenomenon is very helpful for entrepreneurs to enter and grow inside even the most challenging industries. In some situations, the incumbents may respond vigorously to new entrants. But, for the most part, entrepreneurs have the ability to either stay under the radar or outwit the incumbents.

Entrepreneurship is more than just starting a venture. Understand the global trend of buying existing businesses through search funds and scaling them.

This session explores the challenges and opportunities associated with entrepreneurial management and growth. We will focus on the decisions of high-growth owners/managers in recognizing and choosing opportunities, obtaining and allocating resources, challenging and directing personnel, and adapting personal goals and corporate strategies to changing personal business conditions. There are a myriad of important issues for rapidly growing companies, including building leadership capabilities, forming early-stage strategic alliances, learning how to compete in a complex marketplace, establishing and communicating vision, cash planning, and maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit in a growing organization.

New tools are helping us understand who buys and why? AI is changing the field of segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

The world does not have a startup problem. It has a scale-up problem. For instance, only about 10% of nearly 6 million firms in the U.S. have more than 20 employees. In Brazil, 99% of all firms have less than 50 employees. There are many benefits for enterprises to scale—they innovate more, they are more productive, they pay better employee benefits, etc. Luckily, one can learn the methods and the tools and acquire the skills to scale. Finally, at the firm level, all entrepreneurial ventures are about constantly pivoting from one business model to another until they find the one that can be profitably scaled.

"Shark Tank" is a very popular reality TV show in the U.S. Many Babson students—including David Zamarin '19, Abby Speicher MBA'15, and Jamie Siminoff '99—have pitched their entrepreneurial ventures on "Shark Tank" and some have received funding from famous investors on the show. The entrepreneurial journey of finding the innovation opportunity, articulating the opportunity, and finding resources is a process that all entrepreneurs have to undertake. During Babson Build, all participants will work in diverse teams to identify, filter, develop, and articulate an entrepreneurial opportunity. This will culminate in a 10-minute “Shark Tank”-style presentation to the entire audience at the end of the week.

The ET&A session will explore entrepreneurial thinking and how it impacts behaviors that lead to entrepreneurial action. We will emphasize entrepreneurship as a way of thinking and acting that goes beyond the traditional discipline boundaries as we know them today. Examine how entrepreneurs act under increasing levels of uncertainty. There are often two choices when preparing to navigate an uncertain future. You can predict what will happen in the future or you can create the future. We’ll talk about the need to be able to do both.

This session identifies an iterative process for launching a venture focused on market tests and experimentation in the marketplace. This approach combines both the creation and prediction sides of Entrepreneurial Thought & Action® to identify low-cost means of testing your opportunity, learning from the test, and then reshaping the opportunity to take the next, larger test.

This session introduces design thinking as an approach to entrepreneurial action and innovation. Design thinking is a resource for opportunity identification, product and service development, and venture strategy formulation. Using a video case, we examine a social venture through the lens of design thinking to consider challenges in creating value for customers/users and requirements when undertaking an innovation process.

A practical guide for those who are interested in launching new ventures, this session is interdisciplinary and will cover topics ranging from strategic marketing to finance and leadership. Participants will receive hands-on guidance and instruction as they refine a business plan, articulate the value proposition of an opportunity, and formulate a strategy to achieve enduring success in a realistic context.

New ventures or existing companies pursuing new opportunities typically require resources. Entrepreneurial finance looks at the type of funding sources available at different stages of a venture’s life. Financing events occur in stages and are matched to milestones the venture plans on achieving. New ventures run into trouble when they are undercapitalized, but counter-intuitively, also can have problems when they are overcapitalized. This session will examine the interplay between capital needed, valuation of the organization, and strategy.

Participants will study the challenges and opportunities associated with entrepreneurial management and growth. We will focus on the decisions of high-growth owners/managers in recognizing and choosing opportunities, obtaining and allocating resources, challenging and directing personnel, and adapting personal goals and corporate strategies to changing personal business conditions. In this process, participants will examine management challenges for companies that are preparing to become public.

This session explores the many ways that managers and entrepreneurs think about and practice conflict resolution—with peers, bosses, subordinates, suppliers, customers, outside agencies, friends, neighbors, and even family members. Even though many workplace interactions are not defined as a formal “negotiation,” this skill is both a critical managerial capability and the foundation of successful conflict resolution in daily life. The session features active participation in negotiation simulations and exercises, as well as thoughtful application of theory. Participants will have the opportunity to learn more about their negotiating preferences and the consequences of the choices they make. In addition, they will be asked to accept and offer feedback on negotiation behavior that they demonstrate and observe.

This concluding session integrates the content and experiences from the program. Students make Rocket Pitches which are critiqued by the faculty and peers. The objective is to strengthen students’ venture concepts, addressing value proposition, business model, action plans/future planned experimentation in the market, and resource requirements.