040220 SE Seminar Organization and Personnel (MA) (2023S)

This group's focus this semester will be on Entrepreneurship. A core learning objective is to help improve your understanding of the evidence base on entrepreneurship. This is important because small firms make up nearly all of the businesses in the world, contribute to bringing forward innovations and are a major source of employment globally. Another objective is to give you insights into the core areas of entrepreneurship research: the entrepreneur, start ups, scale ups, entrepreneurial finance, exit and public policy.

It provides you with a fundamental understanding of six subjects in entrepreneurship:
1. What is entrepreneurship and what does opportunity recognition and discovery play in entrepreneurship?
2. How should an entrepreneur go about planning a start up?
3. Does prior entrepreneurial experience and motivations guide future performance?
4. What is a scaling business? Is fast growth just about being lucky?
5. What is the entrepreneurial finance ladder and how does finance impact on entrepreneurial growth?
6. Does entrepreneurship policy actually work?

For each of these six topics, there is a preparatory 90 minute lecture where the topic is introduced and critically examined. You are then expected to come together in pairs and chose one of these six topics. You are assessed in two ways: 1) in pairs, an oral presentation of no more than 25 minutes (with 15 minutes for questions; and 2) an individual essay of ~2000 words. The deadline time and date for the presentations are: 24.04.2023. The individual essay is due on: 30.06.2023. For both the joint presentation and your individual essay, you will be expected to analyse and critically evaluate one of the six topics.

The course is taught entirely in English by Professor Francis Greene, the Chair of Entrepreneurship at the University of Edinburgh Business School, the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. The core text is his textbook (Entrepreneurship: Theory and Practice). Complementing this source material will be a range of academic articles to support your presentation and individual essay.

The student will achieve knowledge on the performance evaluations and financial incentives play in various business contexts with a focus on behavioral (or, psychological) issues. She/he will read scientific literature on the subject assigned to her/him and write a paper on the topic. During seminar sessions, the student will present her/his paper and participate in discussions about the findings of her/his and other participant’s papers.
Contents: Behavioral aspects of financial incentive design (four topics), subjectivity and discretion in financial incentives (three topics), biases in subjective performance evaluations (five topics)
Method: Scientific writing of papers, presentations, interactive group discussions