Business creation model: Development of an applied business model for novice enterprises

Economies worldwide depend on successful businesses to create value, employment, and prosperity. Entrepreneurship has been linked to the creation of wealth, increases in productivity, and improvements in the overall quality of life. In Ireland however, 99.8% of businesses are small to medium in size (i.e., employing fewer than 250 individuals), and their management skills lag behind those of other high-income European countries. Whilst this underperformance is masked economically by the current excellent performance of the multinational sector, this systemic deficit poses clear risks to the continuing wealth and prosperity of the Irish economy and its society. Past attempts by Ireland’s enterprise development agencies (Enterprise Ireland and Local Enterprise Offices) to improve this underperformance have had mixed results. This research sets out to address this problem of underperformance for novice entrepreneurs. It focuses on the novice entrepreneur as the main actor in creating a business, and develops an entrepreneur-centric business creation model that empowers them to strategise, formulate, and implement prioritised business creation activities that build business capability and create value. Employing a mixed-methods, exploratory sequential design, the study combines knowledge from academia and industry reports with insights from expert practitioners in entrepreneurship to ground the research in real-world experience. The research follows four phases, respectively: define goals, design the model, develop the model, and validate the model. Input and feedback were sequentially and iteratively gathered and analysed over several interviews and field tests to configure the emerging business creation model (BCM). Research participants included a group of 12 enterprise experts comprising academics, enterprise development officers, business mentors, experienced entrepreneurs, and 62 novice entrepreneurs (33 participating in pilot testing and iteration, and 29 performing validation tests on the finalised BCM). The results indicate that the BCM largely attains its primary objective of facilitating the development of strategically capable novice entrepreneurs. This primary objective is supported by providing a holistic cognitive map of the enterprise domain with which to orient the user; by creating a usable model that is relevant to the user’s needs; by assembling an integrated toolbox (of standard tools, templates, and techniques) for sequenced application towards an end solution; by maintaining a focus on implementation; and by enabling the user to ‘right-size’ the model to a level that suits them. This research makes novel contributions to addressing the serious problem of ongoing underperformance in the SME sector. It makes a practical contribution to the organisational and strategic capability of novice entrepreneurs and the field of applied BM research. It concludes by acknowledging its limitations, and by making recommendations for further study in this important area.

Publisher

University of Galway

Rights

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

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Collections

University of Galway Theses (PhD Theses)