Transcript:

Entrepreneurship - Practice

Want to become a successful entrepreneur? Practice makes perfect. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.

Junkunc: One thing about entrepreneurship that's critically important is that it takes experience. Just like playing a sport or playing a musical instrument, you can't be successful, ultimately, only through study. You have to practice.

Marc Junkunc is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Pamplin College of Business at Virginia Tech.

Junkunc: If you view entrepreneurship as a long term project, I think the advice is to just start doing it. Start engaging. Experiment with things. When you have ideas, when you have creativity, follow it. If you have an idea that you believe could be an opportunity, start putting together the resources. Start making the contacts that you might need. Start asking people about your idea, talking about it, testing it, putting it out in the marketplace, talking to possible customers.

The real research laboratory for entrepreneurship is the real world. In your every day life, you're having frustrations. You find that things could be done better. You find that things could be done differently. You're having ideas, you're having passions, you're having creative thoughts. Those are the seeds to entrepreneurship. When you find something that's not working the way you thought it should work, that's a seed of entrepreneurship. When you have something that you're very passionate about, and you'd like to go out and affect the world, that's a seed of entrepreneurship.

There's an entrepreneur inside of all of us, and the lab is the world. The idea is, just start doing it. Start practicing it. When you lock into those true opportunities, you will find that it resonates with other people. It will resonate with potential customers, it will resonate with potential partners, and ultimately it will resonate with potential investors.

I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.