The study at jibs is closely knitted with our personal experience; each new step is analogous to that taken for a new venture though the operating cost is not only money at the moment. The following are examples perceived in both the personal and academic perspective:
Personal Perspective
Opportunity Identification:
Let’s start with food…students have limited money as they’ve no income, so expenditure must be wisely spent. A market survey (unofficial) was conducted by each individual to find out the feasible and convenient supermarkets, among them Willy was the top, next in line were Netto, ICA MAXI, Hemkop and then ICA.
The opportunities were indentified in the form of discounts at each store.
Bootstrap with a team:
In order to have fresh, healthy and tasty food without outstripping budget; most students used the bootstrapping strategy listed in (Wiklund & Dahlqvist, 2007). Joint utilization of resources e.g rice cooker, pots , pans and food items were shared and not brought separately . Subsidy finance was available in the form of partial subsidy; the food expenditure was shared among the team members, hence reducing the total cost of food compared to the local market.
Academic Perspective:
First Mover Advantage: The Debate:”Opportunity Identification vs. Opportunity Creation” and “Are entrepreneurs born or made?”
A thorough study was done for each side and each team member looked for ways to win the debate. The main goal was to look for a Sustained Competitive Advantage SCA; this was done by attending other team member debate session.
The market was given a fair airing ( Kuratko &Welsch, 2004), SWOT analysis was performed, In this case instead of a business plan, it was the debate material which was update and even constructed from the scratch. All in all, a strategy was defined and each person’s role was communicated.
Although a short venture, at the end of the day…the first mover advantage worked, not only did it test our skills as team members, cleared theoretical concepts but also gave us the taste for making strategies to make the sustained competitive advantage more effective and win the debate.
Growing pains:
The growing pains identified by (Flamholtz, 1990) for rapid growing firms are analogous to the groups made for the reading protocol. Each group had experienced some or all of the growing pains described. This is however a debatable topic, but the data is real and current. My team was in charge of teaching module 7, our main goal was to help our fellow students understand the knowledge we gained and to practically imply it in their daily life. Hence we integrated the questioner provided by Flamholtz with our innovation and business creation course.
Like a rapid growing firm that hire new employees and group together individuals who are unfamiliar with each other’s competencies and hot spot, we can view the same situation with the reading protocol group ( Kuratko &Welsch, 2004).
So instead of firm, we categorized them as “your team”, for profit as “grades” and for sales as “presentation and essays”.
The results were surprising and the idea of the questionnaire implication on our current situation worked. Each group was able to see where it stood in colors as red, purple etc depicting the need to make improvements. Each group, including mine was able to take a step back and anticipate for the solution for the growing pain.