Dr. Thomas Nelson

There is a huge divide in the United States right now. We’re fighting over practically everything. One key issue in this ongoing conflict is how to best distribute limited goods and services. Arguments on both sides are passionate and persuasive. Probably the most contentious issue is healthcare. Liberals believe that the free market is not good at making sure healthcare is distributed fairly. Many conservatives would take issue with the idea of fairness entering into the equation at the distribution level at all. If you’re reading this you’ve probably invested some mental effort in understanding your own beliefs about this issue and the web of issues surrounding it. Although it would be fun to delve into all of those things, give impassioned and reasonable arguments concluding that my way is the right way or whatever, that is not what today’s exercise is about. I want to think differently about government distribution vs. market distribution.

Turning over one fifth of the nation’s economy to the government on a whim, or even as an experiment, seems a little nuts, but what if we could pre-test the hypothesis that government can do it better? For the moment we’re going to leave aside failed socialist states, and assume as liberal orthodoxy tells us, that they just did it wrong.

So let’s not use twenty percent, or two percent, or even two tenths of a percent of the economy. Let’s test the government’s ability to provide a single product at or above market efficiency. If they can do that, then perhaps they can take on something a little bigger, and we can eventually move to a completely state controlled market substitute. The key is picking something that is perceived as necessary, something that is very important to Americans, but, something that if it were to be completely mismanaged and we couldn’t get it at all, or we could only get it in Minnesota, or whatever travesty happened, we, as a country would still be all right.

I’m sitting in Starbucks right now, waiting for a new screen to be put on my iPhone, so I nominate coffee. Let’s let the government completely take over all the coffee business in the United States. Let the government decide how much we get to drink, where we can purchase and at what cost, what beans get imported and how they get roasted, etc. Now, if you own a coffee shop, even if you agree with my premise, which is the government will cock this up and maybe, just maybe America will get the point, you are saying ‘hell no!’ because the government would be coming in and messing with your livelihood. Imagine how the doctors feel.

But you’re right. We need buy in before we pick a product/service for the government to test their abilities on. (But haven’t they already with some healthcare, the military, the roads, education, space, and so on…yes, but repetition is the mother of learning.) So, we need to nominate 19 more products or services. That way Ms. Coffee shop owner only has a five percent chance of her industry being disrupted and is more likely to sign on to my grand experiment. Local governments are neck deep in regulating barbers and hair braiders and so on, so maybe haircare. Maybe breakfast cereal. I don’t know. We just pick them and get everyone to agree.

Once we have the product list it should be simple to get agreement. If you, as a liberal, believe that the government is going to be better at managing the health care industry than the market you should be all in. First, coffee, then cereal, then THE WORLD! If you’re conservative, and you’re sure that the government is going to botch this, you don’t want to sign because you like your coffee and Grape Nuts in the morning, but you realize that the lesson is worth the sacrifice. Plus, if you know it’s coming you can trade some of that gold you have stashed in your safe for a year’s supply of vacuum-packed coffee, and just ride it out. So the conservatives should agree.

There are only two hold outs that I can think of.  People who think governments do some things well, and some things poorly, and philosophical libertarians such as myself who think that even if they did it better, it doesn’t matter because it’s wrong. Since this is my rodeo I’ll sign on. I can’t speak for my fellow crazies, or for the people that look at the highway system, or NASA, or the military and see something that the market couldn’t create. I don’t understand them anyway, so speaking for them is beyond me.

It seems to me that at least eighty five percent of Americans should be behind this experiment and honestly interested in the results. There are problems. If the state knows this is a test they can throw massive resources at it, like cramming for a test, and they could ‘fool’ America in to thinking they were competent when they were not. But I’m not sure they would. Admitting, even to themselves, that they had to cheat to run coffee shops might put philosophical brakes on even the most progressive thinkers. The thought process might be something like, I know I had to cheat to win at tic-tac-toe, but I’m sure I can be a grand master at chess.  I hope that no one in power would think that way, although lately I’m not so sure.

The other problem, and one I’m willing to admit is at least possible, is maybe they’re good at it. Maybe coffee gets better under government regulation/control. Obviously I think this is unlikely, but if it were to turn out to be true I’d be willing to reexamine my thoughts. But I’m certain a third of the country wouldn’t, just as I’m sure that if it were a colossal failure a third of the country would say ‘they just didn’t do it right.’

The idea of certain people engaging in backchannel communications (BC) has been making the news lately. The practice has been made to sound very ‘spy vs. spy’ and something that is somehow distasteful. However, if you’ve ever asked your neighbor in a classroom what the professor just said, or ‘do you think that will be on the test?’ then you’ve engaged in backchannel communications. Like any tool, BC can be used an any number of ways and for many different purposes. Today I’d like to gather and share my thoughts on using BC in the classroom. The thoughts and practices I’ll be discussing have not (to the best of my knowledge, which is incomplete and almost certainly wrong) been empirically examined for effectiveness or systematically developed. They are an ad hoc collection that has been useful to me. I probably stole all of this from someone, and when I remember where it is from I’ll include that, but in most cases I’ve been doing this stuff for so long the origins have faded from my mind.

BC participation, Active, Passive, Asynchronous, and Non: Participation in BC communication, at least in my classes is voluntary. Some individuals prefer to focus their attention on one thing at a time, others are unable to multitask in this way. That’s OK. If there is something important in the BC they can always look it up later, a practice known as asynchronous BC, a term I just made up and am quite proud of. Some students may prefer to log in to a platform and just read what happens without comment. This passive participation, also called lurking, seems to help some students maintain focus on what is happening in the class. Finally, some students may choose to engage in BC by making comments, asking and answering questions, and upvoting or downvoting other questions and comments.

The use of BC during Q & A: This one comes directly from the people who developed iCorps. When people are pitching business ideas in front of an iCorps panel any instructor is free to ask a question. However, there is typically one instructor assigned to do a deep dive on understanding each business being presented, and that person leads the questioning. iCorps uses the text messaging tool Slack to ‘feed’ questions to the primary interrogator (sounds scary, and it feels scary when you’re being shot gunned with questions, but that is part of the purpose of the practice). This helps the overall process in a few important ways. First, the interrogator doesn’t run out of questions before Q & A time is up. Second, it is often easier for the business person (or victim—just kidding)  to respond to the same instructor repeatedly instead of keeping a bunch of names straight. Third, people don’t step on each other verbally. And finally, when presented with a large que of questions, the person who has done the deep dive can weed out irrelevant or less important questions to maximize the learning experience for the business person. This is a flipped version of learner to learner BC below.

Learner to learner (private) BC: Any method of communication that includes you and your fellow learners, but not the teacher, falls into this category. Quite often team organization apps become impromptu BC’s in a classroom setting. On one hand, this is great because it self organizes. However, there is usually no channel for the entire class. Getting the entire class on one platform and creating a channel for everyone solves this problem. If it is important, due to the situation or student preference that the instructor not be involved in the BC, a student can create a channel and share with everyone but the instructor. This sort of a channel with no oversight will empower some students to ‘speak up’ where they otherwise would not, and might end in great conversations in some classes. There is a greater risk of bullying and other non-socially acceptable behavior however. Students in this sort of group should self-monitor and try to keep on topic, otherwise, the value of the BC will be diminished.

Inclusive BC’s: All skate. Everyone can see everyone’s comments and questions, including the instructor. This seems to be the most common use of BC products in the classroom. It has many advantages, and very few problems, at least in my limited experience. Typically, most if not all comments are ‘aimed’ at the instructor, but often if something is asked and a student can quickly answer, they do, leaving more time for other topics. If a question resonates with students, they retweet it, upvote it, or ask it again so that the instructor can see in real time where there are gaps in understanding, or where new topics need to be introduced. I’ve heard that when this is set up anonymously some professors have had behavior problems but I’ve never experienced it. Also, although I don’t do it, if you use a platform that attaches identities to students, BC activity could be factored into a participation score.

BC Platforms: Just about any platform can be used as a class BC. I’ve used Facebook Messenger in the past and it works pretty well. Students can have their own team chat, a group chat without me, and a chat with me in it that I put up on the projector for everyone to see, whether or not they are personally logged in to it. I’ve been thinking of experimenting with Twitter, but so far haven’t. I’ve used Chatzy as an anonymous platform, and I’ve heard good things about Socrative. I’m looking into GoSoapBox as well, primarily because it has a feature called a confusion barometer. That sounds pretty neat to me. I’m still looking for a simple, easy to use, free, classroom tool with some sort of upvoting feature. But I might find a unicorn first, and then, hey, I’d have a unicorn so I’d probably be out all day riding it and not teaching.

Final Thoughts: Here is a short list of suggestions for using BC’s as a student.

1. Stay on topic.
2. In private BC’s if you must stray from the topic be as succinct as possible.
3. If it’s been said and you agree, upvote instead of restating (if you have that capability)
4. Refrain from downvoting unless a comment or question is inappropriate or off topic. Remember, just because it’s not important to you doesn’t mean it’s not important.
5. Remember, the internet is forever. Even if your platform is supposed to be private it only takes a second for a screenshot.
6. Anonymity is not an excuse to be an ass.
7. If this (or any) tool enhances your learning, use it. If not, don’t.

I’ve been teaching the business model canvas for a while, both to students and to people actually starting businesses. From time to time there has been a question about where to put some specific piece of information or hypothesis, and I’ve been kind of lax in my understanding and explanation of where various bits of info go. The area labeled channels is where the confusion started for me. In business we typically talk about distribution channels and marketing channels, so it seems that this box has to do double duty. At least that was my logic, and that led to making other assumptions, such as your employees could be part of your cost structure as well as key resources and key partners. I discussed this for just a few minutes with Dr. Michael Chambers recently, and he corrected my thinking so gently I almost didn’t notice that he was doing it. I was explaining to him how I handled channels, and through our conversation he got me to realize that although in business we talk about marketing channels, when we’re starting a new business (and probably thereafter) it is more appropriate to think of marketing as communication with the customer, thus part of the the customer relationship. (I believe that this flaw in my logic stems from my inherent mistrust of marketing communications.)

After we had this conversation I starting thinking about other situations where I allowed students to categorize a fact or a hypothesis in more than one place, and I think I’m coming to agree with Benjamin Franklin “a place for everything, and everything in its place,” at least when it comes to the business model canvas. Take the earlier example of employees. Their salary is certainly part of the cost structure, maybe other expenses associated with them, but they themselves are not part of that structure. They are also not key partners. The company literature may say that. They may even be called partners, but I think a better characterization of their role, if they are central to the success of the organization, is a resource, and if they are not, then they don’t really show up on the canvas at all. If they were not employees, then they would be partners. I’ve gone though example after example in my head, and if I think about it deeply and clearly, I am able to fit each and every hypothesis into a single box.

I think accurate categorization is important because there are often important differences in how you test hypotheses, according to how they are categorized. Confirming a hypothesis (academics forgive me) for a distribution channel involves determining how you will get your products into that channel, and whether or not your customers will use that channel to purchase your products. Testing a customer relationship involves attempting to reach the customer and determining the hypothesis’s effectiveness in strengthening the relationship and/or generating a purchase.

I’m sure my thinking on this will evolve further as I use and teach the business model canvas, but I believe I’ve made a leap forward in understanding that will hopefully help lots of people.

P.S. If you’re one of my students and I gave you less than stellar advice using my previous approach to the business model canvas I apologize. I do stand behind my previous statements that testing is better than not testing, and capturing the information is good, even if it’s not precisely correct. I’m not sure if this is where people say sorry/not sorry, but I’ll just say if you feel like you could use some help with an ongoing project, or to understand this process better, just get a hold of me.

When you teach entrepreneurship, you are inevitably asked for advice (usually free) on starting a business, by all sorts of people. I don’t mind helping out, but when it’s a family member I think twice. I want everyone to succeed, but on some level if some man doesn’t follow my advice, or some woman does but fails anyway I’m not really bothered. I know that the advice I hand out is sound, based on received theory, empirical research, experiential learning, and my own personal experience. But if my mom’s business fails, I feel like it’s my fault, whether it is or not.

What follows are my recollections of two of my moms’ businesses. Believe it or not, the apostrophe is in the right place. I was for a time, probably due at least partially to my own shortcomings as a child, a foster child. I had the honor of calling many wonderful people mother and father. If not for some of them I’d be a very different person today, and I’m thankful for each one that stepped up, even for a little while.

Mom business number one: Nancy, my foster mother for the last three years of high school and a lifetime inspiration wanted to start a business. She had done some of the heavy lifting of finding a niche in a crowded market, designing a product, having stock manufactured, and beginning to sell. She asked me, along the way for advice and some help, but it was clearly her business. I bought her a web domain, got a graphic designer to create a banner, got her original website set up and so on, so that she could supplement her in-person sales with online sales. That business ran quite well until she fell ill and passed away. I have asked a couple times if I could run that business, more or less to keep her memory alive, but I’ve been shut down at every turn. I’m told that the family intends to restart the business, but its unique place in the market has been eliminated by imitation, and its established goodwill erodes daily. It makes me sad because it’s wasteful for no reason. This could have been avoided through planning. A simple succession plan is all it would have taken for this business to have survived the death of its founder.

Mom business number two: Dicki, the amazing woman who gave birth to me, and puts up with all my crap, recently started a business. She asked me for advice on various things and I gave her the same answers I would have given anyone else, the same answers I gave Nancy several years ago in fact. She asked someone else to do her website, which is fine, I told him how I would get the information to get it online, and I believe it’s being done as I write this. However, when she realized she wasn’t going to get a website immediately, she made one herself, on Facebook. She didn’t wait, she just did it. She had already developed a novel artistic product, and produces beautiful, salable art pieces which she sells for about 25% of what they should go for. (If you’re reading this and you’re selling something I’m going to go out on a limb and tell you that you should probably raise your prices. Most people undersell themselves.) She markets them in person at various venues. She’s in a conservative market and wants to move product, so I understand the low prices. Selling is half the fun!

The point is, in both cases, action is more important than just about anything else. This is the one thing that is so hard to get through people’s heads. The days of planning to plan to plan the plan are behind us. We have phase-shifted into a world where action is the first step. Maybe we’ve always been in that world, and it’s just taken the internet to show it to us, I don’t know. But for my money, give me a person, even (especially) a relative, that’s going to do it with or without me and I’ll be on board. I’ll do what I can to facilitate their success; we can work out the details later. But if someone wants to hang around the ‘startup culture’ and talk about starting a company, they can pay market rate for my time.

If you’d like to seem my mom’s business, click here.

This post is specifically about the Causeway Pitch Competition (CPC) at the University of South Alabama (USA). Some of what I write here may be useful to you for other contests as well. This year’s CPC was structured as a two stage contest. In stage one contestants submitted a poster about their business idea. That poster was judged on its own merits to determine which ideas made it in to the finals. In the finals students gave a 1-2 minute prepared speech explaining their idea.

Part One: My Poster Wasn’t Selected for the Finals

There are many reasons your poster might not have been selected. I’ll list and comment on some of them in no particular order.

1. We received 29 entries. Not all of them could win. It might be that your poster was very very good and you just missed the cut.
2. We received 29 entries, 23 of them on the last day. It is possible all the entries were working diligently on their entry for weeks or months. It is also possible that some students put together their entry at the last moment. Only you know if this applies to you. Research shows that people believe that they perform well under pressure, but really they don’t. I’m not pointing any fingers here, I had a deadline yesterday (as I write this) of 5:00 p.m. and I turned in the work at 4:12 p.m. I had thought about the project for a while, but I didn’t really settle on exactly what I was going to do until yesterday morning. As a result I was rushed and probably didn’t make as good a case for myself as I could have.
3. You may not have tailored your poster to what the judges were looking for. This is hard. We tried to make it easy by publishing the judges instructions on the contest web page so that you could see exactly how they were going to judge. For example, in this particular contest, posters for for profit businesses were rated from 1 to 5 on four different things: the problem your business is solving, how your business was going to solve it, why you think it will work, and how much money you think you’ll make. So your minimum score is 4, and your maximum score is 20 (5 in each category). If you said nothing on the poster about how much money you thought your business idea would make it would be very difficult for a judge to give you more than one point (the minimum) in that category. Some judges looked at an idea and decided for themselves how much it would be likely to make, but they were not instructed to do so.
4. The judges might be less knowledgeable than you, at least in your specific area of expertise, or have a different opinion of what is important than you do, or any number of other differences of that nature. For example, if you take a strong stance on a political issue, and the judge disagrees with you, it is possible that they would score your idea differently than if they agreed with you.
5. Your poster may have been difficult to read, or hard to understand, or perhaps it didn’t communicate your idea as well as you thought. A poster is one form of communication. It’s different than speaking in person because it has to stand alone. Perhaps if you had been standing next to your poster to explain it, it would have been much better, but that wasn’t point of this part of the contest. If your poster didn’t explain your idea on its own, then it is unlikely it would make it though to the next round.

Part Two: I Pitched, But I Didn’t Win

1. If you pitched in the Causeway Pitch Competition, you did win and congratulations! But I know what you mean. So let’s talk about it.
2. There were 12 entries and 3 winners. We had a bunch of judges, and perhaps you were just edged out.
3. There was a short span of time to prepare your pitch after you found out you were in the finals. All of the winners were preparing their pitch before they got in the finals. I know this because every one of them was emailing me and coming to my office before the finalists were selected. If you started preparing after you found out you were in the finals you may not have had enough time to adequately prepare.
4. What you presented may not have matched up with rubric the judges were using. This is the same idea as point 3 above. The recommended way to present an elevator pitch for this contest was to present the 5 p’s in order. The reason for this was so that the judges could ‘follow along’ and know where your presentation was headed. This was to make scoring easy and fair. If you presented different information than the 5 p’s or presented them in a different order it is possible that one or more of the judges was confused and didn’t know how to score you.
5. You may not have presented as well as you could have. This could be due to lots of things. Speaking in front of people is hard. I find it easier to talk to groups about things I care about, but many students tell me the more they care about something the harder it is to overcome nervousness or ‘stage fright’. Again, if you didn’t know your material well you may have missed an important point, or not communicated it as well as you could have.

In Closing

No matter how far you made it in the competition, no matter if you won money or a trophy, I am proud of your effort. The 29 of you who entered did far more than your peers. Just like the sign at our rec center says ‘the only bad workout is the one you don’t do’ or something like that. This was a mental workout. It was hard. It’s supposed to be. I hope it was rewarding, and I hope you learned something that will help you later in life. And great news! We have another contest coming up in the spring. It’s harder, but there’s more money, and I know you’re capable. I look forward to seeing more great ideas from you in the spring.

AoM got busy. These write ups will be even shorter than the previous ones.

Saturday

Crowdfunding PDW

Interesting group, interesting discussion. No one (still) likes my relationship of Kickstarter to offline pre-sales, such as concerts. That’s ok. No one likes it when I point out that a mortgage is a bundled loan (it is really the deposits in the bank (well, 9 times the deposits of the bank) being lent, not the bank’s own money, so a mortgage in some sense is a crowd funded loan. Think Jimmy Stuart in It’s a Wonderful Life) either. I’ll get over it. Here are some bullets I got from this.

• why people buy and donate on Kickstarter is under researched
• the crowdfunding research is taking off, but it needs to be careful to not fall into Stuart’s Trap (which is apparently, not connecting to other areas of research…–so I know what that is now too….)
• (of course) there is a file drawer problem
• Demographics don’t seem to matter (to success) once you get the funding to start your project. This is probably the most significant non significant finding I’ve ever heard.
• There’s something called ScholarFlock.com that I need to check out someday.
• Paper Idea — Crowdfunding as cultural and/or social investment
• Paper Idea — Types of pitches that perform better (this wasn’t covered in the PDW, I just came up with it while in the session. I think if I could get a sample of pitches that failed, then later succeeded by redoing their pitches (along with some that failed twice) I could learn something interesting)
• Locally, the Crescent Theater might make a good crowdfunding case study. What would you use a crowdfunding case study for? Piola Shoes (from Cincinnati) has an interesting story as well, but I’m not sure I’d be able to get permission to tell it. I might be able to sanitize it though.
• Corporate KickStarter is a thing. (interesting paper idea–how do people relate to corporate campaigns?
• Is there some way to get to lying in campaigns and how that affects stuff? I’m thinking about the changing story of iCPooch here.
• Stretch goals are an interesting area of study.
• How is feedback incorporated into the product.

Digital Technologies: A Game Changer for Entrepreneurship?

This was Per Davidsson’s session. Great job, like every thing he does.

Some interesting ideas. Most agree that entrepreneurship is entrepreneurship and technology is a tool. The PDW recommended thinking about digital technologies as (digital) artifacts, platforms, and infrastructure.  Everyone seemed to agree. I may be a bit behind the curve here, but I’m not sure I could articulate the difference between each of the three. I do think that digital technologies move us towards more forgiving business models. That is, they make it easier to try and fail, and eventually succeed because the cost of failure is so low, and the level of success can be so high. When initial capital outlays are tiny and there is a zero marginal cost for additional units shipped, profit potential is pretty great.

Then came Susan Marlow, questioning that technology is a great leveler, that entrepreneurship is easy, and an idea plus a laptop can equal success. First, no one really claims this. Thinking people realize that technology levels the playing field, but no playing field is perfectly level, some are just more level. Second, no one thinks it’s easy, they just think it’s less costly to fail, making eventual success possible. Finally, an idea plus a laptop plus A TON OF WORK can, but may not necessarily equal success. It works. Not every time, nothing works every time. But it does work. And then we brought intersectionality into the conversation. I am so tired of people thinking that the reason some people are more successful than others is that they’re being kept down. Maybe that’s true. But plenty of people have refused to be kept down, and all this focus on these problems will not make them go away. It will institutionalize the very problems it highlights. Sigh. Enough soapbox. If you think the internet is not good for your particular special group try to get them to give it up.

Digital Footprints: We all have digital footprints. This blog is one of them. I’m sure that there are things in here that will keep me from getting hired, getting tenure, or getting promotions at certain jobs. I’m sure there are things in there that will keep me from being on certain boards, and so on. I’m sure there are things that might even keep me from starting some businesses. I’m too old to care. I should care, but I can’t make myself care. What use are digital footprints for entrepreneurs? That is an interesting question.

Howard Aldrich closed out this session by positing that digital entrepreneurship is third industrial revolution. Howard is a genius, so I felt pretty good because I’ve been saying words to that effect in class for several years now.

How Can We Make Entrepreneurship Research Relevant?

This PDW was run by Norris Krueger. That is enough by itself to justify attendance. Bullet points again.

• What would happen if I would disappear? Does the e’ship paper I’m working on matter enough that its absence would be noted? What happens if I don’t publish this?
• Look more into Kauffman’s Reports on Entrepreneurial Ecosystems.
• Look at Kauffman’s Mayors Conference. Recommend to Mayor if appropriate.
• Remember, policy makers do not read academic articles. Hit them where they are.They look for knowledge that leads to action. They DO NOT CARE about your lit review. (That’s cool. I don’t either really.)
• One good suggestion was tiered writing. Start with a readable working paper. Make a 2 page executive summary. Maybe make it into a blog post. They didn’t say this, but maybe a series of tweets….
• Paper launch events for things you want to be noticed.
• Most of this is to do boundary spanning. You translate your papers to the appropriate audience.
• Know if your study seeks to understand or explain. To this I’d add predict.

Lean Startups and Innovation Strategy: Towards a New Paradigm? — This contained a lot of stuff I’d heard before. One very interesting point that was made was that on the Business Model Canvas the only parts that matter are Customer Segments, Value Proposition, and Channels. I get what they were saying, but I’d want to see the research before I discarded 2/3 of the entire canvas.

I was scheduled to attend Leading Entrepreneurial Ventures: Individual and Team-Based Perspectives, but I was conferenced out for the day. I went back to the room, did some back exercises, and got ready for the Entrepreneurship Social that evening.

Sunday

Team-Based Learning for Entrepreneurship Educators & Getting Student Buy In With Team Based Learning.

These were both run by Peter Balan, from the University of South Australia. They were both part of a sub conference of the AoM, which I’m not sure why exists, other than to take an extra $130 of my University’s money. Both seminars were very valuable to me. I believe I’m sold on team based learning. Next summer I would like to develop a suite of TBL exercises and fully implement it. If implementation is easier than I think it will be I may fully commit in the spring. I’m going to adopt some of the exercises teaching techniques I learned this semester, but doing a complete change over on such a short time will shortchange the students I think. And even if I were able to pull it off, it would leave no time for other duties.

While the sub-conference took a break I squeezed in a lunch session on Entrepreneurs and Individual Differences. I found the entire stream of research as presented uninspiring. We are all different, no matter how much some people want that to not be true. We have differences in intelligence, drive, access to capital, access to markets and opportunities, and so on. Some differences are hard-coded (genetic) into us, some are situational, and some we create ourselves. I’m comfortable with that, because there is nothing I or any entrepreneur can do to address some differences, and everything we can do to address others. Focusing on why certain cultures start certain types of businesses, certain genders have different opportunities, or particular ‘races’ (I so hate that word, it’s incorrect, and politically charged) have differing success rates is boring to me.

The FLIPPED Workshop

This was a hands on practice session with various online tools. I was familiar with many of them, and have been using them in my classes for a long time. But there were a few new ones, and I’m looking forward to receiving the email packet from the instructors so that I can weave in a few more online exercises.

After this session I retired to my room in order to work on a business plan for a Mobile area client.

Monday

Family Business Exit and Survivability — Mixed bag of papers

ENT Plenary Session — Managing an Entrepreneurship Center: A Director’s Perspective

David Deeds and Michael Morris anchored a very competent panel focused on running an entrepreneurship center in an academic setting. I was surprised by how much we’re already doing right at South.  The Center Directors on the panel have huge budgets and we’re doing almost all of what they’re doing. I did get some good takeaways from this, but I had Dr. Mosley there with me, and they’ll probably be his initiatives. I have enough to do with what I’m already doing.

Crowdfunding: Signalling Knowledge and Trust — This was supposed to be run by my friend John Mueller, but he was unable to attend for whatever reason. Still an interesting paper session. The research on crowdfunding is advancing fast. Several good papers investigating signaling, trust and syndication.

The remainder of the day was entrepreneurship business meetings and social, which I did not attend.

Last Day

A Multi-Level Perspective on the Processes of Learning, Knowledge Creation and Sharing — This paper session was on topics I know a relatively small amount about. That being said, the entire thing was very frustrating. I went to this to see Cai Unger’s presentation. He’s a doc student at South. Nice guy, and smart. At the conclusion of his presentation, he took questions from the audience, only they weren’t questions. They were the ramblings of people who had something to say, who may have been very knowledgeable, but seemed to be grandstanding for some reason I don’t even understand. If someone had tried that with me I believe I would have said ‘I’m sorry, what was the question?’ But I guess we don’t do that in academia.  At any rate Cai did a great job and several from South were there to support him.

After that I hit the road. There were more sessions I wanted to go to, but there was also a whisky run to make, and my own bed to get to.

This was an eventful day. I had a full, full schedule. I’d like to thank the Academy (always wanted to say that) for putting together an excellent program. I’ve compiled some quick notes on the events I attended. As you read this keep in mind that these are only my views. The people that worked hard to put these programs together no doubt know far, far, more about their topics than I do. I probably missed the point on many, or even all, of these sessions. Any errors of understanding are mine.

8:00  Hogwarts School of Leadership: Two engaging ladies from UAB (University of Alabama, Birmingham) explained how they run an upper level leadership course using the Wizarding World of Harry Potter as an extended example to motivate participation and help students understand the concepts. Their class sounds amazing. My take aways were some examples of running a flipped classroom, some specific types of exercises that I can work into my classes to encourage that out of class work is completed, and most importantly, a new to me take on running teams in the classroom. They suggest larger teams than I’m used to using, and keeping the same teams all semester. I can see their points, but I’m not sure I’m ready to commit to doing that. I will give it some thought though.

9:45  Writing Better Theory: I showed up to a standing room only panel session. The line to get in was out the door and past. Security closed the door and ran us off, citing fire code concerns. I was really looking forward to that session. I asked if I could just put my pocket recorder in the room and pick it up later but they were unaccommodating.

12:00  The Future of Entrepreneurial Intentions Research: It was good to hear and be part of this type of conversation again. I have missed the theoretical world. I’m not sure if there’s a place for me in intentions research, but we’ll see. The people putting on the PDW think that they should kill the theory of planned behavior, and they made a good case.  Their argument was that the world is complex, and TPB does not adequately explain or predict, from an empirical standpoint. They also discussed the iterative nature of the relationship between attitudes and intentions. I think most people agree that feedback loops are far more prevalent in the models that scholars put forward than they let on. But how on earth, even with panel studies, are you going to model intentions leading to attitudes, reinforcing intentions, reinforcing attitudes, heightening intentions, finally leading to action?  It was hard enough writing feedback loops into design theory, where you have a well defined and well documented iterative prototyping process. Is TPB wrong? Certainly. I can tell you for sure that I was in business the first time almost before I made any decision, let alone formed an attitude about it. Besides that, I learned a little about a new data analysis technique called fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis, or fsQCA for short. It proposed multiple solutions when they are present, I guess. Lastly, there was a long list of topics that need to be studied, the most interesting of which was the idea of collective intentions. We shall see if I find something in this area. They did say that for this research to be really interesting, it should be linked to performance. That made me smile, mostly because I say that about all research.

1:45 Creating a Shared Online Course in Creativity and Innovation:  I mean no disrespect, but this PDW felt like 50% Why won’t you join our teaching collaborative, and 50% Please like my Facebook Page. That’s harsh, and I honestly got a lot more out of it than it sounds like. I did find out that people  have similar problems and techniques for teaching C&I. The people hosting the PDW also have a lot of video content, some of it is even Min Basadur, who’s work makes up about half of my C&I class at South. It will be nice to get access to those videos and use them as outside assignments. It sounded like they have a bunch of course modules that could be plug and play, and are full of subject matter experts. I look forward to getting to know them better, and participating in the community they’re trying to create.

4:00  Fostering innovation in entrepreneurial ecosystem research: This one was long, and I was tired. Great stuff though, and I think I have a paper idea out of it. The panel discussion had three debates.

1. Constructs, metaphors, and analogies — there was conversation for and against using the the ‘ecosystem’ concept. Points were made on both sides. I took from this the same thing that I took from my year-long conversation about what entrepreneurship was. It’s like Jim Fiet said to us, just define it and move on. The definition may be different in the next paper. As long as your work is internally consistent, you’ve done your job. (I’m paraphrasing. I’m sure what he said was shorter, and better phrased, but that was the idea.)
2. Methodological Rigor — it’s lacking. Duh. Not to go off on a Fiet tangent with this post, but great men discuss ideas, lesser men criticize methods.  Other issues discussed were what’s the proper unit of analysis, what’s the DV (hint, I think it’s performance…so either businesses started, cash taken in and spent, or maybe even Per Davidsson’s favorite variable, job creation. I like that one.), and can you generalize your findings and how. All great questions. Oh yeah, and what are the boundaries of the ecosystem, and what constructs are we examining.
3. Theoretical Foundations — Maybe I was tired, and I’ll go back and listen to the recording of this later, but I could barely understand what was being said. It wasn’t accents or jargon, I just wasn’t tracking too well I think. They did give a nice list of theoretical lenses from which to examine ecosystems. I came up with a very doable paper idea (I think) just from the list. I think I can get data from snowball sampling smaller market ecosystems, then  use standard SNA analysis to spit out potential variables like cohesiveness, and such, then perhaps set jobs created or dollars funneled to businesses as a DV and see what pops out.

Finally, this session introduced me to a potential new tool, Kahoot.IT, a instant feedback survey-game website. This might increase student engagement a bit.

6:00 Exhibit Hall Opening Reception: Went for 5 minutes. Didn’t stay, even though there were people there and companies I wished to talk to. One free drink was not worth fighting that crowd. So I had a nice dinner, retired to my room to work on other stuff, and now I’m putting this together before bed.

It’s the day before the start of the Academy of Management’s annual convention. I find myself in a Marriott Hotel in Atlanta. The bulk of the sessions that I’ll be attending over the next several days take place in this building, or right next door in the Hilton. I’m in a lovely little room with a view of part of Atlanta’s skyline. The room is a Staywell Room. I’m sure there’s a trademark or something, but I’m not sure how to do that on WordPress so imagine a little TM where it is supposed to be. The features of the Staywell room are not that important to me, but the upgrade was complementary due to a fair amount of travel hacking over the last several years. They have a filter on my shower to remove the chlorine from the water. I assume that this is the same chlorine that the city adds to the water, but I’m not sure. Maybe they add it on location, just to take it out of the water in their premium rooms. I have an air purifier in the room. I have an aromatherapy machine in the room. The lights have settings like relax, energize, and circadian. I’m pretty sure if I were a twenty something that I would find all of this tech pretty awesome. They do have tech in the room for me too. They have an iron and ironing board. I’ve already ironed my clothes for tomorrow. They have a coffee maker with my name (figuratively) on it. There’s a tiny fridge that now has some cheese residing in it, just in case I get hungry in the night.

I’m excited to be here. This is the first Academy I’ve been to since graduation that 1) I’m not paying the entire bill and 2) I’m not looking for a job. I can focus on the job at hand. I’ve got so many sessions on my calendar. I’m focusing on stuff that will make me better at my job. I’m attending some sessions on writing, some on entrepreneurial ecosystems, and some paper sessions in the areas that I’m researching. Tomorrow starts out at 8:00, and as I write this, it’s really today, so I’m going to bring this to a close and try to get some rest. I wonder if there is a light setting for dark.

Cleaning Out My Comments

Almost every comment I get is spam. Some of them are hilarious. Here are four at more or less random, because it amuses me to put them up.

Comment One

It’s perfect time to make some plans for the future and it’s time to be happy.

I’ve read this post and if I could I want to counsel you
few attention-grabbing issues or tips. Perhaps you can write next articles
referring to this article. I wish to read more issues approximately
it!

Comment Two

I’ve been browsing on-line greater than 3
hours lately, but I never discovered any fascinating article like yours.
It’s pretty worth sufficient for me. In my opinion, if
all website owners and bloggers made good content material as you did, the net might be
much more useful than ever before.

Comment Three

增达网：

群发软件免费下，无限广告免费发，

百万流量免费享，十级提成免费拿。

①：手机营销软件，QQ营销软件，博客营销软件，论坛营销软件，邮件营销软件，终生免费下载

②：独立二级域名，可建八个栏目，可以无限制发布自己的产品、项目、广告

③：您发布的广告在官网首页和全体免费会员网站显示，终生免费共享全站百万流量

④：逆向网赚，上线替下线发展，自动下滑，五五倍增，十级提成，不用推广也赚钱。

注册网址：

Comment Four (On a post that said only “I have a bunch of wonderful, attentive students” on another website I use)

As you will inevitably learn on your path to losing weight, effective weight loss is not only about watching what you eat, but much more about changing your lifestyle. This means changing your habits and how you approach your day-to-day life. Read this information to help you throughout the process.