Enterprising competencies
Marco van Gelderen
This website is devoted to a set of so-called soft skills or competencies underlying entrepreneurship, namely generating ideas for opportunities, taking action, perseverance, networking, teamwork, and convincing others. These competencies are becoming ever more essential whether you are an entrepreneur (by any definition), self-employed (or zzp’er), freelancer, contract worker, or even as an employee. Enterprising competencies can be used in many contexts, not just business. You may know all there is about production, distribution, marketing, finance and such, but if your individual level enterprising skills are not very developed, you may still not get very far, unless you have someone in your team who makes up for your weaknesses.
As an Associate Professor at VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands, I have developed a wide range of action learning formats to study and practice enterprising competencies. This learning-by-doing is supported by the academic review articles of the various competencies provided on this website.
Please email me a line at m.w.van.gelderen@vu.nl if you are interested in:
- collaboration on research projects
- the provision of short courses
In recent years I have run short courses amongst others at the VU University Amsterdam, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Turku School of Economics, Aalto University Helsinki, Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University, ESCP Berlin, and Massey University Auckland.
I am currently editor of the learning innovation section of the Entrepreneurship Education & Pedagogy journal. Furthermore I am editorial board member of the Journal of Business Venturing as well as of Entrepreneurship Theory & Practice.
My philosophy of course design: Autonomy as the guiding aim for entrepreneurship education.
A recent chapter with an overview of entrepreneurs' competencies: Entrepreneurs' competencies. (click here for the entire book)