Transcript of a short interview with Dr. Wilson Zaire (University of Eastern Oregon) about entrepreneurship education. Zaire emphasizes that entrepreneurship is experiential, compares entrepreneurial work to engineering/architecture (assembling venture pieces), and discusses the trade-off between working on the business vs. working in it, market–product fit, and the importance of personal branding and business skills across professions.
Chapters
Entrepreneurship is something that you need to experience too. Beyond that, we want entrepreneurs to be able to look at somebody and say, you know, if they can do it, I can do it too.
We've got Dr. Wilson Zaire here. He has 20 plus years experience in entrepreneurship, business operations, and actually he is a professor at University Eastern Oregon. Tell me some of your thoughts on that, on entrepreneurship and education.
At some level, being an entrepreneur is kind of like being an engineer or an architect too. You've got to put together this venture, figure out where all the pieces are coming from. Anything that's strategic, I want to own. Anything that I'm passionate about, I probably also want to own too. And so how do we do that? Well, part of that is giving the tools that you need to be successful.
The people who I find the most successful are those who can be the entrepreneur and be good at their trade, but also be very good at marketing and running the business of their trade.
As an entrepreneur, there's always this difference between working on the business and working in the business. And it's a really tough trade off. Oftentimes identifying that market might change because the product we've created may not match the market we have in mind. So maybe we have to adjust the market, but maybe we have to adjust the product to match the market too. So there's an iterative process there where we have to make sure everything's in alignment.
Talk to me about maybe how you talk to people or teach them about the addition of that personal branding, the running the business, even if they are a musician, a doctor, an athlete or whoever, because they have to be good at both. Or like you said, find the people. How do you teach that?
That's a great question. I mean, and it comes up from time to time. I.
