Fundamentals for Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur: From Business Idea to Launch and Management

This is the complete, modern guide to every facet of creating a successful new venture, from identifying and evaluating opportunities to effectively exploiting them. Using examples from real-life entrepreneurs, Alan L. Carsrud guides you all nine key pieces of the entrepreneurial puzzle: the individual, entrepreneurial team, opportunity, business concept, revenue model, resource acquisition, launch, execution, and growth.

Carsrud thoroughly discusses entrepreneurial mindsets, motivation, attitudes, and leadership, and covers the entire process of starting a company from business idea through the first four years of operations. You’ll learn how to:

• Recognize, define, test and exploit business opportunities
• Develop business ideas into business concepts with revenue models that create value and can be profitably sustained
• Determine your concept’s feasibility through industry, market, trend, economic, breakeven, and risk analyses
• Establish a proper ethical and legal foundation for the business concept
• Succinctly and effectively demonstrate your concept’s viability to a potential funder
• Organize and manage human and social capital -- including resources provided by your family

Throughout, Carsrud offers entrepreneurship techniques and approaches you can use in many ways: to build your own profitable new venture, create a successful non-profit, make a public agency more effective, transform your current organization, or succeed as a self-employed professional.

Malin Brännback, D.Sc. is Chaired Professor of International Business and Dean at Åbo Akademi University from where she also received her doctoral degree in management science in 1996. She also holds a B.Sc. in pharmacy granted in 1986, also from Åbo Akademi University. After completing her doctoral degree she was appointed Associate Professor in Information systems at University of Turku. In 2000 she was recruited to Turku School of Economics and Business Administration as Professor in Marketing and became the founding head of the Innomarket research group. Innomarket’s focus was to support start-up biotechnology companies in their commercialization processes. In 2003 she was appointed Chaired Professor in International Business at Åbo Akademi University. She has served as Vice-Rector of the university as well. Currently she is Docent at the Turku School of Economics where she taught prior to returning to Åbo and she is Docent at the Swedish School of Economics and Business Administration in Helsinki (Hanken). She has been visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship at Stockholm Business School (Stockholm University) since 2012. She has been on the boards of several biotechnology and IT start-up firms. She has held a variety of teaching and research positions in such fields as Information Systems, International Marketing, Strategic Management and Pharmacy.

 
She has 200 publications in areas such as entrepreneurship, biotechnology, marketing, and knowledge management. She has co-authored seven books with Alan Carsrud which include: Entrepreneurship (2007), Greenwood Publishing; Understanding the Entrepreneurial Mind: Opening the Black Box (2009), Springer Verlag; Understanding Family Businesses: Undiscovered Approaches, Unique Perspectives, and Neglected Topics (2012), Springer Verlag; and Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Entrepreneurship and Small Businesses (2014), Edward Elgar. In addition, she has published three case books with Alan Carsrud on family business with Springer Verlag. She, Alan, and Niklas Kiviluoto recently published Understanding the Myth of High Growth Firms: The Theory of the Greater Fool (2014), Springer Verlag. She is on the review board of the Journal of Small Business Management. Her current research interests are in entrepreneurial intentionality, entrepreneurial cognition and entrepreneurial growth and performance in technology entrepreneurship, as well as social media use as well as the role of culture and language in business.

 
Malin resides just outside Åbo (Turku), Finland in the South-west Finnish archipelago with her husband (Patrik), their three children (Anton, Anna, and Axel), and their two dogs. She is an avid and accomplished chef along with her husband. She enjoys any food with lemons and wine (especially Italian). She loves to knit, can throw a mean clay pot on a wheel, and enjoys working in her garden when it is not freezing (yes there are hot summers in Finland). She adores sitting in the sun on Santorini in the summer as well as enjoying a long weekend in Rome with her husband.

Alan L. Carsrud, Ph.D., Ec.D. was reared in his family’s Texas and Ohio ranching and farm business.  His father was a clinical psychologist and Alan followed initially in his footsteps. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Psychology from the University of New Hampshire, a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from Texas Christian University. He did post-doctoral work in Applied Industrial Psychology at The University of Texas at Austin. He holds an honorary doctorate in micro-economics from Åbo Akademi University in Finland. Today he is Managing Director of Carsrud & Associates, a consulting firm for entrepreneurs and family-owned and managed firms. His consulting clients have included government agencies like NASA and the Republic of Palau, the Los Angeles Unified School District, large firms like IBM and Ernst and Young, as well as numerous family and entrepreneurial firms in the United States, Finland, Australia, Turkey, India, Mexico, Japan, and  Chile. He has been involved in over 200 start-ups in industries such varied as retail, wineries, accounting, food, airlines, biotechnology, internet, computer technologies, and even university based entrepreneurship programs. 

 
He is current academic position is Visiting Research Professor and Docent at Åbo Akademi University in Turku (Åbo), Finland. His prior academic positions include holding the inaugural Loretta Rogers Chair in Entrepreneurship at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada; Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship, Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering, Professor of Hospitality Management and Founding Executive Director of the Eugenio Pino & Family Global Entrepreneurship Center at Florida International University. He has been Senior Lecturer and Academic Coordinator of the Price Center at the Anderson School at UCLA and Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering at the Samueli School at UCLA. He has also been on the graduate faculties of the Australian Graduate School of Management, Bond University (Australia), Durham University (UK), Anahuac University (Mexico), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), University of Southern California, Pepperdine University, The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and the State University of New York at Brockport.

 
He is a Fellow of the Family Firm Institute (FFI) and has served on the board of directors of FFI and the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship. He is Associate Editor of the Journal of Small Business Management, and co-founded Entrepreneurship and Regional Development. He also is on the Review Boards of the Family Business Review and the International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He founded the UCLA Venture Development and Global Access Programs, which help create new, technology-based ventures in Australia, Chile, Finland, France, Italy, Mexico and the United States. In addition, he created the Family and Closely-Held Business Program at UCLA. He has published over 230 articles and chapters on entrepreneurship, family business, social psychology, mental retardation, and clinical psychology. He has co-authored with Dr. Brännback seven books on entrepreneurship and family business and they have three additional books under contract.

Alan resides outside Austin, Texas in the Texas Hill Country with his husband of 14 years, Danny, and their three cats (no he is not a cat lady yet, as that takes four cats) and a half dozen hummingbirds. He and Danny are an avid collectors of Australian aboriginal art, Cuban surrealist paintings, Mexican cubist works, Chinese and Japanese antiques, various antiquities, as well as African sculptures and masks. When not working with Malin on various books and research articles he is usually found on the patio tending his rose bushes with a glass of wine, or a Chilean pisco sour, in hand.