Entrepreneur: Innovator and Risk-taker

UCIL24002 - Entrepreneur: Innovator and Risk-taker

This unit will be delivered face-to-face in semester 2, 2024/5.

• Level 2
• 10 Credits
• Alliance Manchester Business School

This unit forms part of the Enterprise Challenge.

This unit aims to show you how to recognise business opportunities and how to evaluate them. Evidence is drawn from a range of case studies, covering the Middle Ages to the present day. These case studies will be used to illustrate the causes that contribute to business success and business failure, and to show how ideas relevant to business can be generated by a range of activities including hobbies and previous employment.

On successful completion of the unit, you will be able to:

• Describe the different methods through which entrepreneurs generate and implement ideas
• Review the role of innovation, marketing, entrepreneurship and collaboration within a business environment, together with the barriers to growth
• Apply academic definitions of entrepreneurship to a range of scenarios and case studies
• Consider how entrepreneurs react to, and drive, wider social and political changes
• Evaluate the entrepreneurial skills needed within a successful business and how these may be transferred between different sectors

Lecture 1: Entrepreneurial characteristics of individuals and firms

Lecture 2: Where do ideas come from?

Explore factors that influence innovation in products and services, including those that motivate entrepreneurs (opportunity and necessity) and those that aid their knowledge of the market (previous employment).

Lectures 3-8: Characteristics of creative and innovative organisations

Innovations have been introduced by entrepreneurs into a number of sectors. We will examine the impact of entrepreneurs in the sectors of clothing and homeware, beauty, agriculture and natural resources, transport and communication, music and technology. We'll also explore the idea generation process by considering how entrepreneurs react to, or even drive, changes in the wider social and political environment.

You will learn about the role of collaboration in entrepreneurial success, including across different disciplines and skills sets. In order to gain customers, many entrepreneurs have made innovations in marketing, and the significance of those is examined.

Lectures 9-11: Managing innovation in large and small firms / Barriers to growth

Successful entrepreneurs often grow their firm through further innovations. However, there are barriers to growth, including the financing of additional research and development and the management of employees. These lectures examine the challenges and consider how both large and small firms can overcome them.

• 12 x 2 hour lectures, delivered face-to-face

• 2 x 1000 word case study analyses (50% each) OR
• 2000 word written assignment on innovation at the sector level (100%)

Academics and teaching staff from the Masood Entrepreneurship Centre.

The Enterprise Challenge combines enterprise UCIL units with a community-based enterprise project.

Entrepreneur: Innovator and Risk-taker is one of the 10 credit enterprise UCIL units you can study as part of completion of this challenge.

UCIL units are designed to be accessible to undergraduate students from all disciplines.

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