Welcome to Entrepreneurship, an OpenStax resource. This textbook was written to increase student access to high-quality learning materials, maintaining highest standards of academic rigor at little to no cost.
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Customization
Entrepreneurship is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY) license, which means that you can distribute, remix, and build upon the content, as long as you provide attribution to OpenStax and its content contributors.
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Art attribution in Entrepreneurship
In Entrepreneurship, most art contains attribution to its title, creator or rights holder, host platform, and license within the caption. For art that is openly licensed, anyone may reuse the art as long as they provide the same attribution to its original source. Some art has been provided through permissions and should only be used with the attribution or limitations provided in the credit.
Errata
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Format
You can access this textbook for free in web view or PDF through openstax.org, and for a low cost in print.
About Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is designed to meet the course needs of a one-semester undergraduate course on the subject. This resource will cover the key principles of entrepreneurship alongside the concepts, strategies, and tools needed to succeed as a small business owner, franchisee, founder, or other entrepreneurial professional.
Coverage and scope
Our Entrepreneurship textbook aligns to the scope and sequence of most introductory entrepreneurship courses. We have endeavored to make the core theories and practical concepts engaging, relevant, and accessible to students. We sought to achieve this by relating concepts to everyday life, contemporary issues, and the real-world challenges that students may face as twenty-first century entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurship course coverage and approach varies greatly by institution. Some programs focus on research or cases, others on simulation or competition, and many synthesize a variety of approaches. While OpenStax engaged a wide array of faculty reviewers, opinions differ based on the purpose, audience, and structure of the course. The material’s open licensing enables you to customize the content and incorporate additional resources in order to fit your course goals.
Engaging Feature Boxes
Throughout Entrepreneurship, you will find features that engage students by taking selected topics a step further and challenge students to apply what they are learning. Each feature box contains either a link to a deeper exploration of the topic at hand or critical thinking questions that may be geared toward class discussion, student projects, or written essays. Our features include:
- Work It Out. This feature presents entrepreneurial opportunities or dilemmas for which students are asked to work out a solution.
- Are You Ready? Students are asked to reflect on their readiness for applying the chapter’s concepts in these integrated exercises, partial plans, or scenarios of a plan or project.
- What Can You Do? This feature challenges students to take the role of a social entrepreneur and balance a host of interests, some conflicting, as they explore possible venture opportunities.
- Entrepreneur in Action. Chapter-relevant entrepreneurial endeavors are profiled so students can examine the real-life efforts of entrepreneurs.
- Link to Learning This feature provides online resources and videos that are pertinent to students’ deeper exploration of the topics. Link to Learning boxes allow students to connect easily to some of the most important thought leaders and concepts in the field.
Module materials that reinforce key concepts
- Learning Objectives. Every module begins with a set of clear and concise learning objectives. These objectives are designed to help the instructor decide what content to include or assign, and to guide students on what they can expect to learn. After completing the module and end-of-module exercises, students should be able to demonstrate mastery of the learning objectives.
- Summaries. Section summaries distill the information in each module for both students and instructors down to key, concise points addressed in the section.
- Key Terms. Key terms are bold and are followed by a definition in context. Definitions of key terms are also listed in the glossary, which appears at the end of the module online and at the end of the chapter in print.
- Assessments. Review, discussion, and case questions accompany every chapter, providing opportunities for students to recall, discuss, and examine the concepts learned in each chapter.
- Suggested Resources Each chapter concludes with a collection of additional resource links to provide budding entrepreneurs with additional resources to support their entrepreneurial goals.
Answers to Questions in the Book
Answer to all Review Questions and Case Questions are provided in the Instructor Answer Guide via the Instructor Resources page. Due to the high variability of responses and the focus on critical thinking, answers to Work It Out, Are You Ready, and What Can You Do questions are not provided.
Additional resources
Student and instructor resources
We’ve compiled additional resources for both students and instructors, including Getting Started Guides Companion PowerPoints, an Instructor Solution Guide, and a Test Bank. Instructor resources require a verified instructor account, which you can apply for when you log in or create your account on openstax.org.
Instructor and student resources are typically available within a few months after the book’s initial publication. Take advantage of these resources to supplement your OpenStax book.
Community Hubs
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To reach the Community Hubs, visit www.oercommons.org/hubs/OpenStax.
Technology partners
As allies in making high-quality learning materials accessible, our technology partners offer optional low-cost tools that are integrated with OpenStax books. To access the technology options for your text, visit your book page on openstax.org.
About the authors
Senior contributing authors
Michael Laverty, Colorado State University Global
Dr. Laverty received his BA from the University of Notre Dame, his MBA from the Keller Graduate School of Management, and his EdD from Nova Southeastern University. He is also a certified Six Sigma Black belt. He instructs business courses at numerous universities in the US and abroad. As a former equity partner in a very successful venture capital group, Laverty has owned many business ventures ranging in size from $1–35 million. His continuing scholarly and practitioner-oriented focus is paying back through mentoring and developing entrepreneurial leaders of tomorrow.
Chris Littel, North Carolina State University
Chris Littel is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Management at the Poole School of Management at North Carolina State University and previously instructed at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University and the Institute for Entrepreneurship at Florida Gulf Coast University. Littel holds a B.S. in Engineering from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a master’s in International Economics, International Relations and Security Studies from the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, D.C. Littel has also served in leadership positions in companies such as Johnson & Johnson, and currently works as a consultant. He teaches a variety of entrepreneurial courses in which students work with startup companies to help solve growth challenges.
Contributing authors
Chandra D. Arthur, Cuyahoga Community College
Martin S. Bressler, Southeastern Oklahoma State University
Stephen M. Byars, USC Marshall School of Business
Bryan Coleman, Assumption College
Mehran C. Ferdowsian, Wilkes University
Geoffrey Graybeal, Georgia State University
Wm. David Hawkins, Northwestern Oklahoma State University
Jennifer Herrera, Capella University
Lyzona Marshall, Seton Hill University
Angela Mitchell, Wilmington College
William Nantz, Houston Community College
Denisse Olivas, University of Texas at El Paso
Karli Peterson, Colorado State University Global
Mark A. Poepsel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Kevin Raiford, College of Southern Nevada
Jeffrey J. Sabolish, University of Michigan-Flint
Sally Sledge, Norfolk State University
Kurt Stanberry, University of Houston-Downtown
Reviewers
Joseph F. Adamo, Cazenovia College
Tom Adamson, Midland University
Franklene M. Baker, Grand Rapids Community College
Jennifer Bergenfeld, New York University
Lucian Bifano, Auburn University
Kathy Bowen, Murray State College
Dixon Cooper, Ouachita Baptist University
Shawna Coram, Florida State College at Jacksonville
Peter Hackbert, Berea College
Peter T. Hahn, Roger Williams University
Perry Hidalgo, Gwinnett Technical College
Karen Hines, Berkshire Community College
Nai Lamb, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga
David LeCount, Tulsa Community College
Ira T. Lovitch, Mount Saint Mary’s University
Debra McCarver, Washington State University
Bruce A. McHenry, South Mountain Community College
Russ Meade, Husson University
Eleonor Moore, Kirtland Community College
Phillip L. Nelsen, Salt Lake Community College
Miguel A. Orta, Nova Southeastern University
Chris Papenhausen, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
Susan Peters, University of North Carolina at Pembroke
Brian Pusateri, University of Scranton
William R. Sandberg, University of South Carolina
Natalie Sappleton, Quantic School of Business and Technology
Linda Shul, Central New Mexico Community College
Marcene S. Sonneborn, Syracuse University
Andreas Widmer, Catholic University
Lisa Zidek, Florida Gulf Coast University