Question

2. a. The founder &samhoud has practiced entrepreneurial leadership, do you agree or not? Please provide the answer in detail

b. What do you think that make Samhoud so successful in leading his company?

Answer 1

Answers

(a)

yes, entrepreneurial leadership as "organizing a group of people to achieve a common goal using proactive entrepreneurial behavior by optimising risk, innovating to take advantage of opportunities, taking personal responsibility and managing change within a dynamic environment for the benefit of an organisation".

Such leadership aims to cultivate entrepreneurial individuals and teams that fully leverage their creative potential in creating value for an organisation. Entrepreneurial leadership does this by employing leadership practices that "develop the ability in employees to self-generate, self-reflect, and self-correct in their workplace".

Entrepreneurial leadership is effectively using the skills associated with successful individual entrepreneurs and applying those within the environment of a larger organisation. This especially means within an organisation where those skills have been lost and replaced with a "corporate" mindset that focuses on process, systems and risk minimisation rather than on entrepreneurial behaviour.

(b)

“We need more entrepreneurship in this country”.  Since we came to that conclusion a couple of years ago we decided to take our societal responsibility. In order to foster entrepreneurship in the Netherlands, in cooperation with Utrecht University, we set up the &samhoud sponsored Chair of Entrepreneurship. Professor Sascha Kraus has held this Chair since 2008, in addition to academic positions at the University of Liechtenstein and at the Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland. He was a start-up entrepreneur himself in the 1990s. We interviewed him about value creation and about stimulating entrepreneurship in organizations and among students.

It would be easy to name all the Googles, Microsofts and Virgins of the world here, but are these really the best examples for fostering entrepreneurship, or, even more importantly, ‘Intrapreneurship’, i.e. the entrepreneurial behavior within existing companies In reality, it’s more the small- and medium-sized enterprises ‘around the corner’ which influence the local business community through their customer orientation, accessibility, innovation and vision. The most successful of these make their employees real ‘intrapreneurs’ who act as if they were the entrepreneurs themselves.

Yes, I developed a totally new course on ‘Corporate Entrepreneurship and Innovation’ for our USE Bachelor students last year, which started with officially enrolled students plus a number of students who could not gain any credits for this class, but were so interested in the topic that they participated anyhow. The results of student evaluations of my lectures were quite high, so I was already very happy, but this year – the 2nd round just started in November – tops everything: the number of students has more than doubled! It seems that the word-of-mouth propaganda between the different year cohorts works well. Interest in the topic is clearly increasing, so that the development of the new course has already paid off , and will most likely also bring more students into our Master’s program in Entrepreneurship, and hopefully later on also into the ‘real world’ of (Corporate) Entrepreneurship, meaning that they don’t all necessarily have to found a start-up themselves, but rather act entrepreneurially in established or larger firms also, like the title of this course and also the title of the booklet accompanying my inaugural lecture suggests! Before, and partially also in addition to this Bachelor’s course, I was mainly involved as a lecturer in special ‘Honours’ classes at Master’s level, with a very heterogeneous and interdisciplinary group of (non- Economics) students brought together by my colleague Professor Arie Buijs. This is a different, and perhaps an even more interesting way of teaching since these students bring in so many different mind-sets – even different to mine, being a Management graduate and experienced entrepreneur myself – who is still broadening his own horizons as a professor! It is always great to hear when some of these graduates write me emails years later that they had somehow been reminded of what they learnt in my classes – and sometimes also how far these differ from reality.

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