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 These business models, used by the senior management and employees, are often based on outdated perspectives of both how the marketplace works and the changing business and customer values expected by their demanding stakeholders.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

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

What Happens at the Brand Interface? A Narrative Inquiry into the Brand Management Practices of Small Firms in Hertfordshire, UK

The focus of the inquiry reported in this thesis was to explore the brand management practices put into practice by small firms (defined here as those having between 10 and 49 employees) from the perspective of an ‘entrepreneurial owner-manager’ as the brand owner. My study evaluated the extent to which the personal brand-leadership style of such individuals affects the brand’s interactions with consumers in general, customers specifically, external stakeholders, and its own employees to determine whether those interactions resulted in a dynamic branding strategy capable of delivering sustainable competitive advantage. An exploratory and inductive inquiry based on a qualitative methodology, specifically involving personal, conversational open interviewing, generated a set of narrative cases. The participants were owner-managers of small firms providing services to the consumer market in a single local enterprise area: essentially the county of Hertfordshire. The adoption of a longitudinal design was chosen to address a critical gap in the relevant existing literature, which has so far concentrated on large organisations rather than small firms. This interpretive study of how small firms and their entrepreneurial owner-managers view and exploit a key marketing asset generated a typology of entrepreneurial brand-leadership styles. It furthermore delivers insights into the brand management strategies and tactics put into practice by owner-managers by exploring how and why they are chosen and executed in those real-life cases. I conclude from my inquiry that there is a continuum of brand leadership styles and initiatives, which are determined by the personality, motivation and business aims of given individuals, and on the extent to which they see the opportunities that marketing and branding present for their business. That continuum defines the brand management practices that are adopted and implemented at varying levels of sophistication. The brand is consistently used as a ‘relational asset’, although the extent to which a firm’s staff are enabled and encouraged to engage with the brand through ‘internal branding’, external dialogue and co-creation with consumers at the brand interface is moderated by the marketing capabilities within the firm. All three entrepreneurial owner-managers in the sample were found to be using their brand as a ‘single organising principle’, allowing them to deliver their brand promises and minimise reputational damage to the firm. None of the firms could be said to exhibit a ‘minimalist’ brand orientation. My thesis contributes to the state of academic knowledge and the existing literature by being the first longitudinal study (to the best of my knowledge) to contextualise the brand management practices of small firms, the others having been cross-sectional, as confirmed by Odoom et al. (2017). It shows how the brand management leadership of their entrepreneurial owner-managers is implemented in practice. In so doing, I adopted the seminal Service Dominant Logic lens proposed by Vargo and Lusch (2017). The existence of the research gap it thereby plugs is confirmed by Frow et al. (2015) and Kazadiki et al. (2016). The findings in turn point the way for less exploratory research in future. My study also makes a significant potential contribution to the curricula of undergraduate and postgraduate marketing education, until now dominated by theoretical frameworks and models applicable to branding and brand management of large organisations, by presenting case-based evidence of those strategies and tactics in the small firms that make up a significant proportion of UK economic activity. By the same token, my findings can contribute to the work of policymakers and business advisors to (for example) Local Enterprise Partnerships, in which, according to the Institute of Directors, the quality of available advice for small businesses is highly variable. Returning to the academic implications of my study, future researchers can potentially use this formative research to develop hypotheses for a more definitive investigation focused on developing and testing a new conceptual framework for co-created brand management practices in the ‘post-digital world’, thereby updating the widely used model of Berthon et al. (2008). Future studies could also usefully link brand management in small firms to the existing ‘branding archetypes model’ of Wong and Merrilees (2005). Opportunities also exist to develop midrange and micro-level theory that would allow the metatheory of Service Dominant Logic to be further tested, verified, and adapted to the small firm setting. Technical terms and abbreviations used throughout the thesis are described and defined in the Glossary of Terms at the end of the whole document, after the Appendices

SME leaders' drivers to embrace environmental uncertainty and develop their sustainable business model strategy

SME’s that have an owner-manager that is both creative and innovative, having a well-defined business plan and model, is most likely to be experiencing higher growth and productivity than those businesses who don’t. This body of research supports that the SMEs’ growth is dependent on developing a more sustainable business model that reflects the leaders’ attitudes and value towards opportunities and risks. The significant threats of environmental issues on future economic growth, and the wider social community in terms of human health and impact on living conditions, also impacts on future SMEs’ economic and employment growth. This study explores the environmental uncertainty responses of these SMEs, with a particular focus on their sustainable business model innovation strategies and the leaders’ environmental concerns. This paper analyses the two main research questions on the links between environmental uncertainty and SME leaders’ attitudes, values and behaviours. The study collected data, both quantitative and qualitative, from 60 SMEs in the East of England. The findings indicate that SME leaders’ alignment of attitudes, values and behaviour towards external environmental uncertainty is dependent on their level of knowledge, understanding and commitment to SBM change, and as importantly the sector’s need for changes. Those that are proactive are more successful, being first-mover in the sector, and inevitably seeking more ways to co-produce to add both business and customer value. Achieving significant sustainable business model innovation is possible when either driven by the industry towards compliance, and/or when the SME leader is committed to it, for either personal reasons (altruism) or in recognition of the business and customer value, both short and long-term. SME leaders gain confidence in implementing sustainable innovations when they have a holistic framework, the business model, to envision its impact

Tri-partnerships in Knowledge Transfer: changing entrepreneurial mindsets

The challenge to the UK’s continual drive towards a low-carbon economy is the relatively low take-up by SMEs across the sectors. Over the last twenty years the government has invested considerable resources and time into supporting initiatives and demonstration projects associated with driving SMEs to develop wider and more diverse sustainable market opportunities in this areas. The Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs), universities, have a significant role to play in this, being both the potential source of know-how and technology transfer, and being a relatively unbiased/trusted source of business advice to the usiness community. Using knowledge transfer is not an effective or efficient way of integrating knowledge, instead knowledge exchange includes the additional activities of understanding and integration both of which involve a cost to industry. Yet, at the back of this is the need to open the business entrepreneurs’ mindsets to change, to change as a consequence of reflection-in-action. There is existing research that suggests that entrepreneurs mindsets, and the way they think about opportunities and threats in their environment is largely driven by their ability to adapt, and this is influenced in some small way by their cognition processes. This paper reports on the findings of a longitudinal study into six enterprises involved in Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, exploring the motivations, attitudes and practices of the entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and academic supervisors engaged in these short- to medium-term projects. The principal outcome was a framework by which entrepreneurs and outside agencies could understand the sensemaking behind business model changes, and so achieve increased value from these knowledge exchange partnerships.Final Published versio

SDL Approach to University-Small Business Learning : Mapping the Learning Journey

This paper explores the important link between the knowledge exchange activities of small businesses and universities, and the co-production and co-creation of value as perceived by the small business owner-manager. Small business owner-managers seek out information to help identify opportunities, especially information that formalizes their mental schemas around positive outputs and outcomes associated with innovation adoption and dissemination. More importantly, these same owner-managers identify advisors within these knowledge exchange encounters that will help them develop their mental schemas to understand the requirements for change, analyse the existing or latent market needs, and through this develop new understanding. We present our findings in the form of a map detailing the co-production/co-creation of value derived from university-small business collaboration, and some insights into the motivation, rationale and experiences of both parties. We conclude with our understanding of the outcomes and impacts derived, and suggestions on how the collaborative partners could better manage the whole process