Brains versus Capital

Entrepreneurship for Everyone: Lean, Smart, Simple

Entrepreneurship is not a calling only for the selected few. Creative work and economic self-realization are goals that anyone can pursue. Learn how to create your own "idea-masterpiece" as a collage or puzzle made from existing pieces, and construct your own company from pre-existing components that are freely available to everyone. Brains versus Capital: Entrepreneurship for Everyone opens up many channels of opportunity for many people who never thought that they would start their own company. This book emphasizes knowledge-based start-ups, which offers a crucial difference to classic self-employment and the new technology based start-ups. Günter Faltin has been teaching this approach for decades, and he has applied his theoretical concept with great success to "The Tea Campaign" (Teekampagne), the largest mail-order tea company in Germany. A growing number of companies uses Professor Faltin's principles successfully. Featuring practical examples of successful companies, Günter Faltin shows how anyone can refine an idea to create a new company. By combining components that already exist, a small start-up founder could even challenge the big companies.

Contents:

• Foreword by Fritz Fleischmann, Babson College
• Introduction
• The Tea Campaign as a Case Study
• Start-ups: Creative Concepts, Not High-Tech
• The Step-Child Concept: It Pays to Finetune Your Concept
• Avoiding Overload
• Building a Business with Components
• Playing in the Big Boys' League
• How to Work Out Your Own High-Potential Concept: The Entrepreneurship Laboratory
• Entrepreneurship as a Challenge
• Say Goodbye to Old Ways of Thinking (Don't Draw Conclusions about the Future Based on the Past)
• An Invitation to a Dance
• Appendix: Everyone Can Become an Entrepreneur: An Interview with Professor Muhammad Yunus (Excerpt)
• References
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Endnotes

Readership: Students, practitioners and general public interested in entrepreneurship and founding businesses.
Key Features:

• The original German version is the most successful book on entrepreneurship ever sold in Germany
• This book demonstrates in easily understood and approachable terms that a well thought out idea is more important than a patent, modern technology or a large amount of start-up capital, in deciding the success of a company