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Title
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Research-by-Design : stimulating entrepreneurship and innovation
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Author
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Abstract
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| Entrepreneurship is important in many ways. On many occasions, researchers have stressed the importance of entrepreneurship for economic growth. As a result, entrepreneurship is stimulated and supported by many initiatives in order to increase the number of entrepreneurs and to increase the success rate of these starting firms. Prior research mentions the drivers and the barriers for individuals to start a self employed career. Among the drivers the need for independency and the opportunities for a higher income gain the upper hand. On the barrier's side risks and uncertainty prevail. In the group of barriers for starting an enterprise two aspects are important: the need to find a proper business idea and the need to find complementary competences in one or more co-founders. This paper proposes a research-by-design approach tackling these two important barriers for entrepreneurship. Through the design of a product-service system the potential field of opportunities is scanned and mapped in order to find solutions for the most important gaps, which are -in turn- being evaluated by the process stakeholders. The research-by-design project follows a human-centered approach, integrating divergent and convergent thinking in the early development stages, in which we focus on the user's needs throughout the process of starting a business. The resulting product-service focuses on high potential entrepreneurs with a lot of experience in corporate business, having the skills for entrepreneurship but to whom the final step for a career switch is too big. The solution integrates 4 important aspects: finding complementary competences, developing and enriching business ideas, designing the business and formalizing the cooperation between co-founders. It also differentiates on required speed in the start-up process and the status of the business idea at that point. Both the research-by-design process and the resulting solution build on the product development methodology in the front-end of innovation in which analysis and synthesis alternate, in order to propose validated solutions for a specific need. |
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Language
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English
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Source (journal)
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European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship
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Source (book)
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Proceedings of The 13th European Conference on Innovation and Entrepreneurship : ECIE 2018, 20-21 September, 2018, Aveiro, Portugal / Costa, Carlos [edit.]; et al.
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Publication
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Reading
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Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited
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2018
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ISBN
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978-1-911218-97-5
978-1-911218-98-2
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Volume/pages
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(2018)
, p. 741-750
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ISI
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000540889200086
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Full text (open access)
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Full text (publisher's version - intranet only)
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