IJED- Editorial Focus

We consider animals to be dumb, but the smart among us learn from them. Karate masters have long perfected some of the most effective martial styles by observing how certain animals naturally take advantage of their shape, size and special skills to overcome their adversaries. Are there other learnings available from the animal kingdom?

The first article by Lynne Butel and Alison Watkins explores how Ant Colony Optimization techniques could be used to understand patterns of entrepreneurial activities. Ants individually have only limited intelligence and skills, yet live in well-organized colonies. Somehow the whole colony seems to work as a single organism that shows entrepreneurial skills in solving their problems regarding food, nesting, nursing, cleaning and tidying etc. through improvisation and adaptation to the external environment. They are also capable of reallocating resources in response to the changing demands of the colony. Consequently, the paper goes beyond focusing on the entrepreneurial actions of an individual and stresses instead on the "community of actions" by a group of entrepreneurial agents that may in themselves be small and trivial, but aggregate to a significant outcome.

In the second article by Shuji Honjo and Takeru Ohe, the authors study eighteen information technology related ventures in Japan to understand initial marketing mistakes. They hypothesize that entrepreneurs tend to depend more on intuition than on a systematic market study, are optimistic in their assumptions and this behavior depends upon their background and the opportunity origin. The paper shows that almost all companies were optimistic in their estimates and had to make course corrections, but not before the business was affected and precious time lost.

The biggest challenge that an entrepreneur can throw to its established competitors are through his resourcefulness and innovativeness. This is the subject of the article by Gunter Faltin, "Creating A Culture of Innovative Entrepreneurship". It goes beyond introducing techniques for generating entrepreneurial ideas, to envisaging a larger role for the population to contribute to generating ideas and adapting them to be in consonance with society's values.

Based on their experience, G Jayabal and K Natarajan in their article "Project Formulation - A Zero Based Approach" give practical advice based on their experience on how to estimate project cost and keep them down to a minimum.

The last article by Mathur advocates an information system for entrepreneurship development for India that leverages the latest information technology tools.

As usual, this issue also carries other regular features, such as a book summary, research summary and entrepreneurial tidings.

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