Starting as a surfer, peddling sandals in beach shops along the California coast, Doug Otto has had his share of wipeouts.
 
Otto, the co-founder of Deckers Outdoor Corp., gave the main address at the 2009 Babson Entrepreneurship Forum. In his remarks, he noted that success only happens when you aren’t afraid to fail.
 
“We always kept a new project going, some of them were successful, some of them weren’t,” Otto said. “But you never know what’s going to pay off.”
 
As a maker of lifestyle brand products, Otto found success with Teva sandals and UGG boots. His company focused on taking niche products and making them market leaders.
 
By creating iconic products, his company was able to grow out of economic downturns in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s.
 
Otto said the time is right again for new businesses to pounce.
 
“I believe right now is the prime time for entrepreneurs,” Otto said. “When times are tough, the big companies are too busy looking at their balance sheets, looking to cost cut.”
 
“Look around you for the holes that are out there,” he said.

Sarah Beatty, the founder and President of Green Depot, calls herself an “accidental entrepreneur.” She’s also working to redefine the word “green.”
 
“Green today is not about being a martyr,” said Beatty, a Green Entrepreneurship panelist at the 2009 Babson Entrepreneurship Forum. “It is about saving ourselves and being smarter.”
 
Starting in 2005, Beatty set out to sell of green building materials, and in the process has also developed a filter to help her customers learn about the different types of benefits that green products offer.
 
Co-panelist Jason Graham-Nye, co-founder of gDiapers, said the term “green” does carry some negative connotations that have hurt his business. 
 
Yet, as major retailers like Target and Wal-Mart show increased interest in green products, Graham-Nye said green is becoming more mainstream.
 
With it, opportunities are expanding for entrepreneurs like him to make money doing meaningful work. 
 
That is something that Beatty also believes in.
 
“The power of the dollar, and how we use it and the questions we ask can be transformative,” Beatty said.
 
“We’re pressing the reset button from a consumer perspective, from a supply-chain perspective and a building code perspective,” she said.

Anand Vengurlekar has seen enough to know the best innovations are driven by observation.
 
Vengurlekar is the CEO of Stoic Denmark, a leading Danish branding and innovation consultancy.  A panelist for Corporate Innovation at the 2009 Babson Entrepreneurship Forum, Vengurlekar said companies are too often bogged down by their own preconceptions.
 
The solution?
 
“You go out there and observe, and observe and observe,” Vengurlekar said. “Get out there and understand what’s really going on.”
 
He said the best companies allow employees to question accepted norms, ask the right questions, and take the time needed to create game-changing innovations.
 
When choosing an established company to work for, Vengurlekar said aspiring entrepreneurs must first check find out the extent to which empowerment exists in the corporation.
 
“Your ability to remain objective to the dogma of an organization is critical to your advancement within that organization,” Vengurlekar said.

For all of her success, Helen Greiner also knows a thing or two about failing.
 
The co-founder of iRobot, and a serial entrepreneur who is now CEO of the new robotics start-up Driod Works Inc, Greiner said it took 18 years to become “an overnight success.”
 
Greiner, the opening keynote speaker at the 2009 Babson Entrepreneurship Forum, said her
dreams - inspired by a love of Star Wars and R2D2 - put her on the long and winding path toward success.
 
“You start with a vast vision but you don’t know what you’re going to be doing a decade from now,” Greiner said. “We had a vast vision but we didn’t know we were going to make vacuum robots or military robots.”
 
To a packed audience at Sorenson Theatre, Greiner said her early failures developing space robots, entertainment robots and research robots, paved the way for her company’s commercial success.
 
By staying close to her customers, learning from failures, building a solid team and staying persistent, Greiner helped iRobot find its winning formula.
 
“My advice to you is just go for it, especially if you are younger and you don’t have the mortgage and you don’t have the kids,” Greiner said. “Especially in this country where if you don’t succeed, it’s still kind of like a badge of honor.”
 
Greiner said the key for her, and any aspiring entrepreneur, is to follow what you love.
 
“Do what you are passionate about and get people who are also passionate about it to surround you,” Greiner said.

“Research in entrepreneurship has come a long way past trait psychology popular in the 1960’s that suggested entrepreneurs were risk-taking, achievement-oriented heroic individuals.  Instead, more than 30 years of research shows that it is behavioral and cognitive psychology that predicts success, not traits.  

For example, the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), a longitudinal study of nascent entrepreneurs showed that those individuals who carried out activities, engaged with customers and acted were more likely to successfully launch.  Further, the vast majority of businesses are started by teams not individuals.  Research from cognitive psychology shows there are different approaches to framing opportunities, and acting on these (see for instance, the proceedings of the Babson College Conference on Entrepreneurship Research, the oldest research conference in the U.S.  (http://www3.babson.edu/ESHIP/outreach-events/bcerc.cfm).  In addition, Babson College has led and sponsored multi-country research study, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) http://www3.babson.edu/ESHIP/research-publications/gem.cfm, a  53 country collaborative study that examines  the process by which individuals  launch ventures. This 10-year-long research shows that entrepreneurs are socially embedded and that country context, resource access, demographics, policies and a host of other dimensions have strong influences on the entrepreneurial process. Importantly, entrepreneurs are motivated by both necessity and opportunity.

One needs to avoid definitions that are somewhat narrow - one who starts a business and achieves mega financial success.   The fact is that success is relative to business objectives and goals.  For some entrepreneurs, success means survival; for others, it means managing a small- to medium-sized firm that can be managed, controlled or handed down to a family member.  For some entrepreneurs, it means selling the business; for some it means growing a wildly successful venture, like Microsoft.  I should add that less than 1% of all U.S. businesses receive venture capital and an even smaller percent grow into Microsoft.

This being said, entrepreneurship is not just teaching business and management skills.  It involves teaching techniques and approaches for identifying, creating, and evaluating opportunities; approaches to acquire, and transform resources (money, people, social, organizational, technological, and physical) and processes for building a capable team to do so. Of course this process can take place inside a large corporation, in family, non-profit or other organizational structure.  But, for de novo start-ups, there is the challenge of building a resource base, building the team and creating a unique advantage without the benefit of having a large corporate structure, policies, funding support, existing customer base and of course, market legitimacy (Academy of Management Executive, Candida Brush, Patricia Greene, & Myra Hart 15:1, 2001). 

If anything, it is about the entrepreneurial mindset and approach.  We believe that traditional disciplines (marketing, finance, operations) can be strongly enhanced by the inclusion of entrepreneurial thought and action.  In other words, how do you segment a market that doesn’t exist? How do you craft strategy for an industry that has no standard?  How do you line up suppliers in an emerging new value chain?  Standard business skills, and current management approaches are based on the assumption the organization exists.  What happens if it doesn’t?  This is where entrepreneurial thinking is required. It is these skills and capabilities that we teach at Babson College.”

Dr. Candida Brush is a full professor and holder of the Paul T. Babson Chair in Entrepreneurship and serves as Division Chair for Entrepreneurship.

Three Babson businesses – Emergent Energy Group, IdeaPaint, and VIVO Natural Products – have been named finalists in BusinessWeek’s America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs Competition.

Please vote for your favorite Babson business at http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1009_entrepreneurs_25_and_under/27.htm.

·         Emergent Energy Group, cofounded by Chris Jacobs while an undergraduate student, plans, designs, and facilitates the advancement of community-based alternative energy projects and sustainable ventures.  Read the BusinessWeek profile at http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1009_entrepreneurs_25_and_under/8.htm.  Visit Emergent’s web site at http://emergentgroup.com/

·         IdeaPaint, established by John Goscha, Jeff Avallon, and Morgen Newman while they were undergraduate students living in Babson’s E-Tower, turns virtually anything you can paint into a dry-erase surface.  Read the BusinessWeek profile at http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1009_entrepreneurs_25_and_under/13.htm.  Visit IdeaPaint’s web site at www.ideapaint.com.

·         VIVO Natural Products, established by Michael Talve ’07, has the mission of creating fine bar soaps from high quality, natural ingredients, which in turn produce wonderful showering experiences.    Read the BusinessWeek profile at http://images.businessweek.com/ss/09/10/1009_entrepreneurs_25_and_under/23.htm.  Visit VIVO’s web site at www.vivonaturalproducts.com.

Voting ends on Nov. 2. BW will announce the top vote-getters on the Small Business channel on Nov. 9.

This is BusinessWeek’s fifth annual search to find the country’s most promising young entrepreneurs.  To be considered, founders had to be 25 or under when the nomination form was posted in late June.

Babson Professor Dennis Ceru addressed a group of 15-20 business professionals and members of CEOE’s international department Oct. 1 in Madrid, Spain.   He talked about how the economic crisis is affecting US companies; issues and opportunities for small and medium size enterprises; and how he views the economic and business environments for these enterprises in the near future.
Here’s a video highlighting some of his remarks:  

Babson Professor Dwight Gertz

“A number of small businesses germinated during the great depression,” said Babson’s Dwight Gertz, “Disney’s Steamboat Willy was one idea and by 1933, Disney executives were sketching the Disney theme park concept on restaurant cocktail napkins.”

Gertz spoke at the Babson College/Wellesley Bank Business Series at the Wellesley Chamber’s Networking Before 9 breakfast held here at Babson this morning.

Disney took a big gamble producing cheap entertainment at a time when the major players in the industry were indeed suffering.  So lesson learned?  According to Gertz, understand market needs and be willing to take the risk.

In a quick review of the housing debacle, Gertz predicted that US housing prices will stabilize in 2010-11 to what they were in 1992-3.  This means that the average US family will have 20-30% less spending power than before the recession.

In a calculation of the relative worth of Americans in a global context, Gertz figures that the US right now is #17 at $47,103 global income per capita.  Liechtenstein is #1 at $145, 734.  Lesson learned here?  Good time to advertise US real estate in Oslo!

After an examination of the current economic environment, Gertz turned the tables and asked Chamber participants their thoughts about business opportunities that could and will evolve from the current recession.

One home entertainment owner sees continued growth in this sector as Americans continue in the “staycation” trend and as “McMansion” homes are cut-up into 2-3 family units….increasing a single opportunity into triple home theater transactions.

Another participant suggested that the housing industry will produce smaller, sustainable, energy-efficient models.

As the US becomes a country of the old and young new immigrants, ESL education will rise along with at-home services for elderly boomers.

And US food exports will continue to thrive but the shape of the transportation industry is an unanswered question according to Gertz.

Six Sigma has many meanings, but over the past 30 years, many businesses have looked upon it as a means of improving quality and reducing costs. Yet critics say the lean philosophy has made Six Sigma unnecessary and that it stifles innovation and strategic change, say Professors Elaine Allen and Tom Davenport in their Quality Progress article “Tune Up.”

In her new book, UPSTARTS! How GenY Entrepreneurs are Rocking the world of business and 8 Ways You Can Profit from Their Success, Inc. magazine contributing editor Donna Fenn interviewed more than 150 young CEOs to learn what makes them tick.  Fenn discussed the book tonight in the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship.

She found that the new generation of entrepreneurs (under 30) are action-driven and that community and collaboration work well for them. 

• 60% of entrepreneurs surveyed started their venture with a partner. Partners are carefully chosen; the new entrepreneurs have a keen, innate instinct to partner with someone who provides complimentary skills.

• New entrepreneurs are into formal entrepreneurship training and there is currently a real hunger for training on a global level. They also seek out the advice of mentors.

• They are especially skilled in thinking outside the box and are intuitivelyskilled when it comes to marketing their products and venture.

• They are successful as Fenn describes it, “in finding the pain in the marketplace and devising a solution.”

• They have a unique ability to create a new spin on an unordinary venture; branding a business that is not normally ‘brandable’; distinguishing an idea within its industry; and sometimes create an industry when there is none.

• More than any generation of entrepreneurs, 70% of the under 30, want to change the world; and this social entrepreneurship attitude is often built into the company mission.

For more on the book and its author visit:  http://www.donnafenn.com/