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Entrepreneurial Management

Entrepreneurship is based on the same principles, whether the entre-
preneur is an existing large institution or an individual starting his or
her new venture singlehanded. It makes little or no difference whether
the entrepreneur is a business or a nonbusiness public-service organ-
ization, nor even whether the entrepreneur is a governmental or non-
governmental institution. The rules are pretty much the same, the
things that work and those that don’t are pretty much the same, and
so are the kinds of innovation and where to look for them. In every
case there is a discipline we might call Entrepreneurial Management.
Yet the existing business faces different problems, limitations, and
constraints from the solo entrepreneur, and it needs to learn different
things. The existing business, to oversimplify, knows how to manage
but needs to learn how to be an entrepreneur and how to innovate. The
nonbusiness public-service institution, too, faces different problems,
has different learning needs, and is prone to making different mis-
takes. And the new venture needs to learn how to be an entrepreneur
and how to innovate, but above all, it needs to learn how to manage.
For each of these three:

• the existing business
• the public-service institution
• the new venture

a specific guide to the practice of entrepreneurship must be devel-
oped. What does each have to do? What does each have to watch for?
And what had each better avoid doing?
Logically, the discussion might start with the new venture, just as,
logically, the study of medicine might start with the embryo and new-
born baby. But the medical student starts out by studying the anato-
my and pathology of the adult, and the practice of entrepreneurship is

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