The Entrepreneurial Process

Brief on Reflective Summary

Over the past couple of weeks, we discussed the following critical themes as essential towards understanding entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mind.
1. High growth versus life style entrepreneurs
2. Hofstede's cultural dimensions and entrepreneurship
3. Necessity driven entrepreneurship/Disadvantaged entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs, ecopreneurs
4. Ethical dilemma in entrepreneurship
5. For-profit entrepreneurship versus social entrepreneurship
6. The role of creativity in pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities
7. The pathways that entrepreneurs take

Select any two of the above themes and discuss them in light of the question below.

The question

Having considered entrepreneurship as a career path as evidenced by your attendance in the class, how has the course affected your view of entrepreneurship? Has it changed your perspective of who an entrepreneur is? And how do you think you will be able to adapt and adopt these new insights into your future career strategies? Your personal reflections and insights will be supported with theoretical argument and peer reviewed research.

How to Structure the Reflective Summary
You are expected to provide some clear and brief theoretical comprehension of the two themes you have chosen for your reflective summary. However, simply defining the themes according to your prescribed text is not enough. You will need to discuss the essence of the two themes by providing a synthesis of wider reading (textbook and academic journal articles) that reflects a higher level of understanding and ability to apply in practice. We will look for evidence of independent research, in addition to the text book, in the way you will discuss/expand the concepts or themes.
You must cite references in text and provide a complete list of reference (at least 10) for all your research that meets RMIT's recommended referencing style.

Based on experiences and observations from previous semesters the followings are some projected issues that are more than likely to surface when the reflective summary will be marked. Please consider the following comments when constructing your reflective summary and try not to make the same mistakes.

1. Level of rigor of academic research to support your argument.
• Need at least 10 references to (generally) to reflect a higher level of understanding.
• Lecture notes DO NOT constitute an appropriate reference, nor is Wikipedia.
• Text and academic journals are a better source of reference rather than Google sourced web addresses.
• Generally the better reflective papers utilized in-text referencing to support their arguments.

2. Intuitive understanding of key themes discussed
• The better efforts highlighted the essence of the key themes rather than just repeated what was in a text a reference or in the lectures.
• The better efforts reflected their ability to extrapolate some of the themes beyond the basic threads discussed in the paper.
• Try to expand on the themes embracing aligned and tangential thoughts beyond that of the obvious discussion points.
• There is no need to define key constructs when those constructs are not discussed in the body of the paper or with reflection of your experiences (AKA a brain dump)

3. Evidence of how the new awareness will be applied to address future challenges
• Remember address this section and discuss in a reflective nature of the impact of these themes and how they could affect your pathways moving forward
• Try to juxtapose how you saw these themes before the course commenced as opposed to how you see them now, during the course, and how they will affect your future actions.
• Avoid general "motherhood" statements as they indicate a lack of internal inquiry
• Always link theory to experiences
• Although nice to hear, there is no need to comment on the presentation style of the lecturers, unless you directly relate those experiences to your own reflective learning

4. Professional presentation - make sure!
• Stapled papers just do not cut it
• One paragraph per point, not a mono-slab of writing
• Delineation between reference list and body of work
• 12 point 1.5 spacing requested

Word Count: 2000 word