Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Third-age Entrepreneurs Propensity to Engage in New Venture Creation and Development’, paper presented at the 4th European Conference on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (ECEI), Antwerp, Belgium, 10-12 September, 2009.Increasingly the issues of entrepreneurship and new venture creation have become two of the most important drivers for future success of the UK economy, especially in the current climate of economic turbulence and uncertainty. The creation of an enterprise culture, one that depends on entrepreneurs, is one of the strategic goals of the UK Government’s action plan for micro- and small-enterprises. The development of these enterprise cultures will naturally create a marketplace ‘churn’, one that stimulates both continuous and radical innovations, and as a consequence of this contribute to the overall UK’s overall productivity and sustained economic performance. Yet research on entrepreneurs, and particularly third-age entrepreneurs, their abilities and motivation to start-up new enterprises within the environmental good and services sector is limited.Our research study utilizes qualitative data collection and analysis. We have engaged with 12 small enterprise entrepreneurs who are currently, or have already started-up a new enterprise in the EGS sector. Our research studies on how opportunities and threats influence third-age enterpreneurs’ values, attitudes and practices suggested that both, sector-wide values and practices, as well as the strength of sector-based systems of innovations, significantly influence the effective prediction of venture creation, development and creative destruction practices. It is these third- age entrepreneurs mindset Business Models (BMs), how they perceive they can generate business value and align their business practices around EGS sector opportunities and threats, that both determines their propensity to create new ventures, and their motivation and success in driving new venture creation and development oportunities. A framework is proposed based on our limited entrepreneurial mindset analysis that links their values, vision and actions with a more substantial evaluation of their overall mindset business model.Peer reviewe

Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats

Christopher Brown, Diane Morrad, ‘Challenging the Enterprises' Business Model: helping entrepreneurs to understand and interpret opportunities and threats’, paper presented at the 15th Annual Edineb Conference, Malaga, Spain, 15-18 June, 2008.Enterprises are presented with ever increasing challenges regarding marketplace uncertainty and ambiguity. They face competitive pressures from local and international sources, their competitors are constantly tweaking products and services to jostle ahead of them, and their customers expect responsiveness and innovativeness to their expressed and latent needs. The enterprises’ very success, and survival, depends on their ability to change their business, market and product strategies to fit these challenges. Underlying these business, market and product strategies is the enterprises’ business model. Simply, business models are an organisation’s understanding and interpretation of how they currently, and in the future, achieve their revenue and profit streams. These business models, used by the senior management and employees, are often based on outdated perspectives of both how the marketplace works and the changing business and customer values expected by their demanding stakeholders. In SMEs the creation, development and creative deconstruction of business models is most often driven by the founding entrepreneur, or subsequent corporate entrepreneurs brought in to provide professional management of these rapidly growing businesses. Interestingly, more recent research has strongly linked entrepreneurs’ mindset, or mental models (Zahra, Korri et al. 2005), associated with the challenges to the enterprise, with their drivers for innovation and changes in their enterprises’ business models. Certainly research has identified the potential value changes, business and customer, that can often facilitate the construction and deconstruction of business value-based innovations (Munive-Hernandez, Dewhurst et al. 2004), and then reflecting these in their overall business processes. This paper discusses the research study, undertaken by the authors, to explore the link between entrepreneurs’ understanding and interpretation of business opportunities and threats, and the potential influence in challenging their mindset business model. The paper begins by discussing the two broad approaches to modelling enterprise strategies and the resulting integrated business models: innovation and process orientations.Peer reviewedSubmitted Versio

Locating Local Education Funds: A Conceptual Framework for Describing LEFs' Contribution to Public Education

With support and leadership from the Public Education Network (PEN), local education funds (LEFs) have worked for two decades to 1) educate and mobilize their communities so that citizen voices are influential in education policy discussions; and 2) support effective partnerships between school district insiders and outsiders to improve the quality of children's education. However, as Useem's study of local education funds points out, it has been difficult to identify the many roles that LEFs play in their communities, the work that they undertake, the obstacles that they encounter, and the contributions that they make. Useem also suggests why the work of LEFs defies simple description. As brokers, LEFs work behind the scenes and in partnership with others, which contributes to their invisibility as catalysts and supporters of educational improvement. LEFs also are highly adaptive organizations that typically customize their change strategies to particular communities. Such attention to local context results in tremendous variation in the organization, work, and accomplishments of LEFs. At the same time, the highly individual nature of each LEF often obscures the overarching values, purposes, and goals that these organizations share, thus obscuring a collective identity.As they mark 20 years of work in public education, LEF and PEN leaders are prescient in their insistence on further research into the role and accomplishments of local education funds in shaping the landscape of public schooling. In August 2003, at the request of PEN, Research for Action (RFA) began work on developing a conceptual framework for: 1) understanding the role and work of LEFs and the many factors that influence what they do and how they do it; and 2) assessing their contributions to public education.This framework will be used to guide future empirical research on LEFs and to develop tools that LEFs themselves can use in a process of self-assessment. Continued research and assessment will provide public education stakeholders with credible evidence and a deeper understanding about how LEFs carry out their missions and demonstrate successes. At the same time, it will provide firm ground for LEF and PEN leaders to chart the next generation of work. This report was prepared for Public Education Network by Research for Action

How Quaker is a Quaker school? : looking for evidence of Quaker practice

Explores how a solid foundation for the vibrant practice of Quakerism in schools is created by the principles that underlie the Quaker Testimonies of Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship. Includes personal interviews with teachers as well as results of a survey given to teachers about their comfort level with using Quaker practice, teaching Quaker Testimonies, and speaking to their students about that of God in everyone

Developing a Relationship With God Through Prayer

My area of ministry is teaching the sophomore religion class at Providence High School. I would like the students to develop a deeper relationship with God. This project will be an attempt to bring these students into a deeper understanding of themselves and their church community. The ultimate goal is that the students will grow spiritually by the grace of God. The time period for this project will be from August 1997 to March 1998. I will start with several surveys and other forms which will give an overview of where the students are presently in their faith development. We will proceed on a weekly basis to develop their love and relationship with God, using the textbook as a basis for the themes. The students will be given different activities that they will work on individually as well as in groups to expand their prayer life

DRAMA PEDAGOGY AND POSSIBILITY: BUILDING COMMUNITY AND CRITICAL LITERACY IN THE CLASSROOM THROUGH ARTISTIC MEANS

This thesis investigates the role of drama pedagogy in facilitating both critical literacy and community in the classroom. To achieve this objective, I provide a theoretical overview of several theorists in the areas of classroom community, critical literacy, and aesthetic and experiential learning and compare their research findings to my own experiences with drama pedagogy, both as a student and teacher. These experiences are structured using narrative, and it is hoped that this personalized format will reveal the lived experience behind facts and events, and better illuminate how aesthetically-based, experiential learning might contribute to the development of both critical literacy and engaged learning communities. Ultimately, I hope to bring together the traditionally disparate fields o f the aesthetic and critical literacy through drama pedagogy, and suggest possible pedagogical implications for today’s classrooms. This thesis incorporates some discussion of feminist theory, and instances of feminist advancement are highlighted as they arise

Rickettsia felis, Transmission Mechanisms of an Emerging Flea-borne Rickettsiosis

Rickettsia felis is an emerging insect-borne rickettsial pathogen and the causative agent of flea-borne spotted fever. First described as a human pathogen from the United States in 1991, R. felis is now identified throughout the world and considered a common cause of fever in Africa. The cosmopolitan distribution of this pathogen is credited to the equally widespread occurrence of cat fleas (Ctenocephalides felis), the primary vector and reservoir of R. felis. Additionally, R. felis has been identified in other hematophagous arthropods (including numerous species of fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, and mites). Most transmission cycles of pathogenic Rickettsia include transovarial and transstadial passages in their arthropod hosts as well as transmission to new vectors through the infectious blood of vertebrate amplifying hosts. The continuous molecular detection of R. felis from other blood-feeding vectors supports the notion of infectious transmission cycles; however, naturally infected mammalian blood or tissues have never been shown to be a source of R. felis infection from vertebrate to arthropod host. Here we demonstrate that horizontal transmission of R. felis occurs independent of a rickettsemic vertebrate host. The combination of intraspecific and interspecific cofeeding transmission of R. felis on a vertebrate host, sustained transmission of R. felis between cofeeding cat fleas in an artificial host system, and support by modeling demonstrated cofeeding as an important mechanism of pathogen maintenance and transmission within flea populations. Additionally, our results indicate that not only are R. felis-exposed cat fleas infectious following a brief incubation period, but utilization of a mechanical mechanism may also explain the rapid rate of spread that typifies R. felis flea-borne transmission within experimental and computational models. Elucidation of the R. felis transmission cycle is necessary to further our understanding of this emerging rickettsiosis