Teaching entrepreneurship with discipline
Discipline may not be the first quality people associate with entrepreneurship. But according to Bill Aulet, senior lecturer and managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, discipline is paramount when starting a firm. Moreover, he says, entrepreneurship is a discipline unto itself, and can be taught through a series of steps — many of them involving hands-on experimentation.This is the approach to entrepreneurship Aulet emphasizes in his new book, “Disciplined Entrepreneurship” (Wiley), which is based on his teachings at MIT and more than 20 years of firsthand experience with startups.The book lays out 24 sequential steps in the development of a company around a disruptive innovation — a process that Aulet and colleagues at the MIT Sloan School of Management have called “innovation-driven entrepreneurship.” These steps include clearly identifying the target customer; calculating the size of a market; charting the competition; quantifying a product’s value; mapping the...