Launch a Successful Business While You Are Still in College?

• Entrepreneurship from college life

Collegiate entrepreneurs are becoming increasingly common as
colleges and universities offer more courses and a greater variety
of courses in the areas of entrepreneurship and small business
management. Launching a business while in college offers many
advantages, including access to research and valuable advice, but
starting an entrepreneurial career also poses challenges, including
a lack of financial resources, business experience, and time. What
are some of the most common myths that prevent young people
(not just college students) from launching businesses?

entrepreneurship and college

• I don’t have enough money to launch a business.

 One
of the greatest benefits of the shift in the United States to
a service economy is that service businesses usually are
inexpensive to start. One young entrepreneur worked with a
friend to launch a Web development company while in high
school, and their total start-up cost was just $80.

• I don’t have enough time

a successful business. Quite a few successful entrepreneurs,
including Michael Dell (Dell Inc.), Richard Branson (Virgin),
Walt Disney (Disney), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and
Debbi Fields (Mrs. Fields Cookies), dropped out of college
to start their businesses.

• I’m not majoring in business. 

Success in entrepreneurship
is not limited to students who earn business degrees.
Anyone has the potential to be a successful entrepreneur.
At the University of Miami, only 20 percent of the students
who have participated in The Launch Pad, the school’s
start-up accelerator, have been business majors.

• I’m not creative enough to come up with a good idea for
a business.

 As you will learn in Chapter 3, everyone has the
potential to be creative. Some of the most successful businesses
are the result of an entrepreneur who recognized a simple need
that people had and created a business to meet that need.

• I don’t have any experience.

 Neither did Bill Gates
(Microsoft) and Michael Dell (Dell Inc.) when they launched
their companies, and things worked out pretty well for both
of them. Business experience can be an important factor
in a company’s success, but every entrepreneur has to start
somewhere to gain that experience.

• I might fail. Failure is a possibility.

 In fact, the survival rate
of new companies after five years is 51 percent. Ask yourself
this: What is the worst that can happen if I launch a
business and it fails? Entrepreneurs do not allow the fear
of failure to stop them from trying to realize their dreams.
If you want to become a successful collegiate entrepreneur,
what can you do to increase the chances of your success? 

 tips that will help in your success.

Recognize That Starting a Business at an Early
Age May Be to Your Advantage
Young people tend to be highly creative, and that can provide
your company with a competitive advantage. In addition, young
people often accomplish things simply because they don’t know
that they are not supposed to be able to do them!

Build a Business Plan

One of the best ways to lower the probability that your business will
fail is to create a business plan. Doing so forces you to ask and then
answer some tough questions about your idea and your proposed
venture. “It’s all about ‘derisking’ your idea,” says Gregg Fairbrothers,
who teaches entrepreneurship at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business.
“Identifying, unblinkingly, what could go wrong and taking
whatever steps necessary to slash the odds that it will.”

Use All of the Resources Available to You

Many colleges and universities now offer courses in entrepreneurship
and small business management and have faculty members
who are experts in the field. In many cases, the people who are
teaching these classes are veteran entrepreneurs themselves with
tremendous reservoirs of knowledge and experience. Some colleges
provide special dorms for budding entrepreneurs that serve as business
incubators. Smart collegiate entrepreneurs tap into the pool of
resources that their campuses offer.

Use of case studies

Some business schools structure their teaching around the use of case studies (i.e. the case method). Case studies have been used in Graduate and Undergraduate business education for nearly one hundred years. Business cases are historical descriptions of actual business situations. Typically, information is presented about a business firm's products, markets, competition, financial structure, sales volumes, management, employees and other factors influencing the firm's success. The length of a business case study may range from two or three pages to 30 pages, or more.

Business schools often obtain case studies published by the Harvard Business School, INSEAD, the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, the Richard Ivey School of Business at The University of Western Ontario, the Darden School at the University of Virginia, IESE, other academic institutions, or case clearing houses (such as The Case Centre). Harvard's most popular case studies include Lincoln Electric Co. and Google, Inc.

Students are expected to scrutinize the case study and prepare to discuss strategies and tactics that the firm should employ in the future. Three different methods have been used in business case teaching:

Preparing case-specific questions to be answered by the student. This is used with short cases intended for Undergraduate students. The underlying concept is that such students need specific guidance to be able to analyze case studies.
Problem-solving analysis is the second method initiated by the Harvard Business School which is by far the most widely used method in MBA and executive development programs. The underlying concept is that with enough practice (hundreds of case analyses) students develop intuitive skills for analyzing and resolving complex business situations. Successful implementation of this method depends heavily on the skills of the discussion leader.
A generally applicable strategic planning approach. This third method does not require students to analyze hundreds of cases. A strategic planning model is provided and students are instructed to apply the steps of the model to six - and up to a dozen cases - during a semester. This is sufficient to develop their ability to analyze a complex situation, generate a variety of possible strategies and to select the best ones. In effect, students learn a generally applicable approach to analyze cases studies and real situations. This approach does not make any extraordinary demands on the artistic and dramatic talents of the teacher. Consequently, most professors are capable of supervising application of this method.Courtesy of wikipedia.....