Organizational outcomes – Week 44 – Dina Zaouid

Entrepreneurship & Networks

Hey hey! The coming couple of weeks I will post not one but two blogs a week. The blog about my internship @Enactus, which I posted yesterday, and another blog which contains weekly assignments of the course Entrepreneurship & Networks.

Networks are of immense importance in an entrepreneur’s life. Different outcomes are attained due to the use of many resources. A distinction can be made between ‘expressive’ (health, social support, accompaniment) and ‘instrumental’ (education, status, job) outcomes. In this blog I will address four different organizational outcomes for the worldwide famous business woman Barbara Corcoran attained due to her network.

Barbara Corcoran origins from a less-than-medium financed family, but when she met Ray Simon, a New Jersey-based home builder, she started her own real estate business. This network was the turning point of her life. Ray Simone gave her $1,000 dollar to start her own business, which resulted in two different instrumental outcomes. First of all, she got her own company (‘a better job’) and following upon that, because she was very successful, she got a very high status in the business world. Another outcome is from an expressive nature and is social support. Ray Simone was her boyfriend and always positively supported her mentally in Corcoran’s business. The last outcome which I wanted to address is legitimacy. Barbara Corcoran strengthened her network with the New York Times journal by contacting them on a weekly or monthly basis which enhanced her legitimacy tremendously in the real estate business world.

As you can see, four different outcomes are attained due to Barbara’s network. Social networks indeed are necessary for success in the entrepreneurial world! So go out and try to build up and enlarge your network! See you next week!

Dina Zaouid

Back to Enactus – Week 44 – Dina Zaouid

Internship blog

Guess whose back? Wow it’s been a while already since I’ve written a post on this blog! Assignments, exams, work, gee it’s been a busy week for me. My other study mates were also busy, inclusive the project manager of Enactus so since the last appointment two weeks ago we only met last Tuesday. However we’ve already made some progress in the direction we want to take for our business plan.

You see, as I have written in my first blog, we are challenged to come up with a ‘Circular Economy’ business plan which solves the problem of the chemical waste in Amsterdam. One of my study mates addressed the problem of abandoned boats in the canals of Amsterdam. It appears that around 25 thousand sail and motor boats are slowly rotting away in the Netherlands, whereas around 9500 unused boats are in the canals lf Amsterdam. Waternet, the organization that’s responsible for the boats in the canals, has a huge problem with reducing the amounts of boats because demolishing is simply too expensive, circa 3000 euros per boat! However, if these boats are left in the water they will cause serious environmental issues in the future. Fuel and oil from the motor will leak into the water and besides that some old boats contain asbestos which is life threatening. Sustainable demolition and recycling is the only solution to this problem!

It sounded like the ideal problem to solve, in which everybody would win: The environment, nature, Waternet, the demolishing factory who can’t manage the amount of boats, and so on. Unfortunately, it turned out that the costs would be too high for us to smarten up the boats. So we were forced to look into another direction. No problem! We’ve actually already have thought of something else, but still some research is required. Curious? See you in my next blog then!

Dina Zaouid

Guido Spooren, Week 44, Networks Assignment 1

Hi readers, welcome to my first blog about Entrepreneurship and Networks!

In this blog I will be talking about Jurgen Ottenhof, an entrepreneur and founder/owner of Oma Bobs Croquetten. I will try to describe 3 organizational outcomes he had realized with the help of his social network.

According to Linn in his article “Building a Network Theory of Social Capital” (1999), “generally three explanations can be offered as to why embedded resources in social networks will enhance the outcomes of actions. For one, it facilitates the flow of information”. In Jurgen’s case, this was very apparent. Jurgen had his own restaurant in Amsterdam, where he, once every couple of weeks, put the “garnalenkroket” on the menu. People loved this product and they wanted him to put this meal on the menu more often. In fact, this product was loved so much, that more and more customers were drawn to his restaurant, which made it a very successful restaurant. In this case, the action was Jurgen presenting his self-made garnalenkroket, and the outcome were people informing other people about this restaurant (flow of information). I think that if this wasn’t the case, Oma Bobs eventually wouldn’t have grown this big.

Eventually, so many people started to hear from Jurgen’s garnalenkroketten, including various restaurants, that business became big for Jurgen. He had to expand, and via a representative of the brand of beer he sold at his own restaurant, he could buy a Vespa motorized tricycle. This person was in Jurgen’s network and could provide him with useful resources, which is also described by Linn. I think that if the representative hadn’t been there to help Jurgen, other people would have, since the business was becoming so popular.

The last outcome I would like to discuss is that, through Jurgen’s hard work and his profitable business, he could first borrow money from his father-in-law in order to buy a bigger vehicle, and later banks were calling Jurgen (instead of the other way around), because they had heard of the growing kroketten business. In times of the economic crisis, Jurgen could borrow money from the banks to buy building for the Oma Bobs factory.

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blog and hopefully you will read my next week’s blog as well! 🙂

Guido

Tom Willemse – Week 44 – MKB Amsterdam

Dear readers,

This week I had my first appointment with MKB Amsterdam. Although it was the second meeting for Lukas and Benjamin, we’re going to look into the improvement of subsidy and SME’s. This week we will look into past studies about SME’s and subsidy so we can take this into account when we develop our own research question.

Hopefully we can interview an entrepreneurship professional in the next two weeks who’s focussing on the improvement of transport and how to make it better for the environment. Starting January 2015, the city of Utrecht will ban all diesel-fuelled cars older than 15 years. There is a similar plan ready for the city of Amsterdam. Changing the whole car fleet of an SME will cost huge amounts of money that can be better used in developing new technologies or expanding the business.

Since today was the first meeting, the upcoming weeks we will be focussing on finding information so we contribute to the Amsterdam SME’s when their subsidy stops and they won’t get into trouble.

Tom Willemse

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Robbert de Kruijff 31-10-2014 Internship, The Battle

During the internship this week, it was time for ‘the battle’.

After three weeks of brainstorming and trying to create the best ideas for our challenge it was time to present our ideas as well as the other team trying to do the same challenge. Again the challenge is to create as much awareness for exit strategies and what to do when the opportunity or business goes wrong, as possible.

At the battle there were two judges, both working at the company from whom we got the challenge and both experts on exit strategy and bankruptcy.

The other group first presented their ideas, which had two segments. The first segment was a leaflet with different perspectives from different stakeholder in it. With it they would try to make the step to realise there is a problem for the entrepreneur easier. The second segment was an interview with a news radio station and with this interview redirect the listener to the leaflet or to the website where the leaflet would be on.

Our group had three ideas, first there is a leaflet as well, but ours would consist a clear picture of some sort of a roadmap for exit strategies. Then we thought we could make a small video and try to reach the entrepreneur in trouble with that. And the last idea was a fun event like a Guinness book of records, many people could like it and it might get a lot of attention.

After consideration with the judges and the other team we will continue with the six of us with the challenge. The challenge remains the same and we now know how we are going to try to reach this awareness for exit strategies. We are going to try to reach the entrepreneur through their direct family with a video and with this video redirect them to the leaflet for information. More details on how we are going to do this will come next week.

Guido Spooren, Week 44, The Battle

Hi readers, welcome to my seventh blog about my internship at Feniksgroep.

Finally, I am able to tell you what our idea is in order to raise the awareness among entrepreneurs of the importance of exit strategies! However, before I will tell you that, I will talk about everything that we have done the past week.

Last Wednesday, it was time for both groups to do the presentations. In order for us to fully prepare for this, our group of 3 met at the VU on Monday and Tuesday. We received contact information from our internship coordinator, so that we were able to contact those people. 2 parties (i.e. Rabobank and the city of Utrecht) thought that our idea was good and they wanted to talk to us in the near future. We are still waiting for other parties like the Chamber of Commerce and BNR News Radio to contact us back. This shows that having a big network, which we got via Feniksgroup, is so important to get things done. This was also discussed during the lectures of one of our new courses: Entrepreneurship and Networks.

On Wednesday, it was time for “The Battle”. First up was our group and we presented our idea of an informative flyer, which we want to spread at various locations, where entrepreneurs can take them and read them whenever they desire. Also, we wanted to design a website where we can show the same information as the flyer and more. In order to make the flyer more widely known, we wanted to make a series of interviews with several  entrepreneurs who suffered a bankruptcy and have them on BNR News Radio to talk about that.

Unfortunately, the other group had a partially similar idea, which you can read in their blogs. In the end, a mix of both our ideas was picked. This means that the challenge ahead is to both make a flyer for the family of the entrepreneur, since they are very close to him/her, and a movie in which we present the importance of exit strategies. I’m very excited about working on this challenge and I will give you more details about the challenge in my next blog!

I hope you’ve enjoyed reading my blog and hopefully you will read my next week’s blog as well! 🙂

Guido

Robbert de Kruijff, 31-10-2014, Entrepreneurship and Networks

Today’s blog will tell something about entrepreneurial outcomes form social networks. I will give two examples of entrepreneur using their social network as a recourse to get an entrepreneurial outcome and try to explain what would happen if this social recourse wasn’t there.

The first example is Jay-Z as an entrepreneur in the music industry, he started his own record label and for this label to grow he needed hip-hop artists. From the past when he used to deal drugs he knew some good hip-hop artists who fit in the style of the record label and Jay-Z managed to get those rappers to sign for his record label. In this case he used his own old network as a resource. The outcome was growth for his company and can be categorised as an instrumental goal rather then an expressive goal since he added something to his own recourses. I do still think it is possible to categorize this as an expressive goal since the outcome it is also possible to create accompaniment or maybe even create good friends.

I think that if Jay-Z wouldn’t have the particular social recourse the outcome could have be the same, the only difference is that it would cost more time to find and reach these people. Most of the new hip-hop artist for the record label didn’t have anything to lose so it probably still wouldn’t cost any extra money.

Another example is the beginning of Nike. Philip H. Knight borrowed money from his father to buy the very first samples of the running shoes to be examined. Short after that he ordered 200 more pairs of shoes and they sold good. After that he eventually started Nike. The outcome of this example is purely an instrumental outcome where the resource is money from his father. He simply wanted to see if there was business for the running shoes. If he was not to have the money from his father he wasn’t able to test if people wanted to buy the shoes. He could have been able to get the money elsewhere is he really wanted to, but the question is if he was motivated enough to do this.

Theory attained form:

Van der Gaag, M. (2014), Lecture 2: [the bright side of] social capital[PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from

Click to access lecture%201%20Introduction%20E%26N.pdf

Week 44 – Matthijs de Mari – Assignment 1, Entrepreneurship & Networks

Hi everyone!

I’m back and this time in the course Entrepreneurship & Networks. This week we had to look at how an entrepreneur realizes organizational outcomes with the help of their social network. In the previous course I followed (Introduction to Entrepreneurship) I read the biography from Bill Gates and I will use him as an example to show how he realized his organizational outcomes. Bill Gates is one of the richest men alive. He built the Microsoft Empire entirely based upon an opportunity with software, he conquered the world not only with producing unique software but also using his network.

There are two types of outcomes, instrumental and expressive. In instrumental actions the return is the gaining of added resources and in expressive actions the return is the maintaining of possessed resources (Linn, 1999). So the instrumental actions are the actions in order to gain resources and the expressive actions are the actions you take to secure your resources.

In Bill Gates’ case a big instrumental action was economic returns. Bill was an independently wealthy because of his parents and had a trust fund. He never used the trust fund and started with almost no money, but his product was so unique everyone wanted it and thus money kept flowing in and Microsoft kept growing, with of course a few hiccups along the way. Another instrumental action was social return. Microsoft’s reputation grew and grew over the years and this also influenced Bill Gates’ reputation since he was the man behind Microsoft. Nearly everyone knows who Bill Gates is and what he did for our world. He certainly left a mark on this planet. Looking at expressive actions you can gain these by your network. A big one in Bill’s case was Paul Allen, who was his business partner and the co-founder of Microsoft. Bill knew him from school and they became friends. Without Paul Allen Bill might have not been this successful. First Paul convinced Bill to drop out of Harvard and second he found their first opportunity (making software for a microcomputer). Kuzuhiko Nishi, a salesman from Japan which Gates met at an event, was also an important network connection for Gates since he opened up the Japanese market for Microsoft and allowed them to spread all over the world. So through Bill’s network Microsoft grew stronger than ever and helped the company a lot.

See you next week!

Matthijs de Mari

Entrepreneurship and networks – assignment 1 – Tom Willemse – week 44

Hi readers,

This week I’ll be writing another blog about entrepreneurship and networks, this week the social part of it. In this case I will use information from an older analysis, the biography of Dirk Scheringa. Dirk Scheringa is (or better: was) the man behind the DSB bank, which went bankrupt not so long ago. He made a billion euro company, which he couldn’t do without the help of others. His wife and friends made him do the first step. He opened up a tax consultancy bureau, without his wife and friends he would still be a policeman. They encouraged him to start his own business, while his wife always helped him. His friends and family had connections to even more people that wanted advice from Dirk Scheringa. Eventually they even asked for loans instead of only tax advice. At a sudden point they both worked 14 hours a day 7 days a week. This small business eventually would become the DSB bank.

Later on, Dirk wanted to open up an art museum. But a municipal officer said he the papers were not right. A week later Dirk ran into the mayor at a party, Dirk wanted an elucidation. The mayor couldn’t change the decision but what he could do is offering an old church to Dirk, hat was much better. Without the help of the mayor or the help of local authorities it’s hard to get things done because of the bureaucratic system. Keeping this in mind, Dirk always sends people flowers when something happened to them, even though he met them only once.

Tom Willemse
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Joep van Gelder, week 44, ACE@VU

Joep van Gelder

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Internship blog

As usual, we had a meeting with our group members and our guide today (Friday). This, however, was not in our own office room. This room was annexed by a delegation of a Zambian university. Therefore, we had a meeting in the canteen this time. Our guide told us that the population for our survey would be twice a big as expected. Instead of 35 people, approximately 70 students have enrolled in the course. As you know, the survey data we collect is used to make a prediction of which students of the master in entrepreneurship will turn out to become gazelle entrepreneurs. Besides that, we will conduct several interviews with some of these students and there also might be a small assignment that they will do. We did not discuss yet what this assignment would look like.

Today was also the day that we would send e-mails to persons we would like to interview. Besides Mark Zuckerberg and Armin van Buuren, who were mentioned in earlier blogs, we want to interview a judge of the Gazelle Awards (Financieel Dagblad, ed.). Furthermore, we contacted one of the winning gazelle enterprises of this year’s Gazelle Awards. We hope to have some interesting conversations coming out of these e-mails. I will keep you up-to-date about that.

Further actions to undertake by next week’s Friday are analysis of the selected articles and the several categories. Out of 45 articles, we will try to make a selection of approximately ten key articles. We try to look for linkages between several articles, as well as returning key aspects, such as personal traits of gazelle entrepreneurs. For November 14th, we planned to create our draft survey. The final survey should be created by November 28th. Lots of work to do. We are still very enthusiastic and we look forward to this month, as theory and practice are going to meet one another.