The rise and rise of entrepreneurship

When it comes to entrepreneurial, risk-taking ventures, they don’t get much bigger or riskier than starting up Australia’s first private university.

So it’s not surprising that, over the past 30 years, Bond University has been at the forefront of entrepreneurship education.

“As one of the University’s founding faculties, Bond Business School is a living case study of how entrepreneurship works in practice and how it has evolved over the past three decades,” said Bond’s Professor of Entrepreneurship, Justin Craig.

“One of the biggest changes we’ve seen over that time is that entrepreneurship has gone from being an esoteric quality – the ‘gut feeling’, the willingness to ‘have a go’ – to being recognised as a legitimate business science that can be taught, studied and researched in the same way as economics, marketing, finance and all the other business fundamentals.

“There is also a clear understanding that entrepreneurship is not just about starting your own business or creating some sort of new enterprise. It’s a core leadership and management discipline, central to the role of team leaders, project managers and decision-makers at every level of every industry sector.”

In addition to offering a suite of Entrepreneurship and Innovation subjects as electives and majors, Bond Business School also oversees the University’s unique entrepreneurship incubator – the Transformer.

Available as a fee-free, extracurricular option to students from all faculties and subject areas, Transformer teaches them to apply the principles of entrepreneurship to a project relating to their own study area or particular interests.

“Our Transformer students are using entrepreneurial principles on projects built around changing behaviours and mindsets,” said Transformer Director, Daniel Abrahams.

“We have film and television students working with health students and group projects that bring together future lawyers, sports scientists and multimedia developers.

“One team was working on an awareness program for the Great Barrier Reef; another team looked at using technology to help palliative care patients stay in their own homes.

“We have also seen some outstanding start-ups, inventions and e-commerce businesses devised and launched; a number of which have been exposed to a global audience of potential investors and mentors through the annual Pitch@Palace contest.”

As part of Bond Business School’s 30th Anniversary Week calendar of events, Pitch@Palace 3.0 will be held at Bond this Friday, July 19.

Finalists from the Bond event will travel to Perth in October for Pitch@Palace Australia, with the top contenders continuing on to pitch their ideas to an audience of global influencers at St James Palace in London.

“Entrepreneurship – that ability to recognise gaps in the market and the willingness to embrace risk and seize those opportunities – is absolutely crucial to a future where time-honoured careers are changing and whole new business models are emerging,” said Professor Craig.

“We’ve already seen the ‘sharing economy’ disrupt traditional industries like tourism and transport, while social media platforms have decimated advertising and mainstream media.

“But those new business models are giving more and more people the opportunity to set up and run not just their own owner-operated small businesses, but worldwide enterprises where they have access to a global marketplace in real time.

“What we need to remember is that the basic fundamentals of business won’t change. To be successful as an entrepreneur in any industry, you still need that solid grounding in finance, accounting, marketing … in not just knowing ‘how’ your business works but ‘why’."

For more information on Bond Business School’s 30th Anniversary Week events, click here.