Dr. Thomas N. Duening is the El Pomar Chair of Business & Entrepreneurship and Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship in the College of Business at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. He is a 1991 graduate of the University of Minnesota with a PhD in higher education and an MA in philosophy. He began his academic career as the assistant dean for the University of Houston's College of Business Administration. There, he was also a faculty member in the Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

He launched his first venture when he was a graduate student. His international consulting firm served the electric utility industry with information products centered on the issue of health effects associated with electric and magnetic fields (EMF) from high-voltage power lines. He and his partner launched the venture in 1984. He left the venture in 1991 upon completion of his doctorate to assume the assistant dean position in Houston.

After his 9-year stint as assistant dean, he founded several more companies. With a partner, he founded U.S. Learning Systems in 1998. The firm provided e-learning content to providers around the country. U.S. Learning Systems was acquired in December 1999 by Aegis Learning. Aegis provided e-learning services to corporations around the world. He left Aegis in 2002 to launch the Applied Management Sciences Institute (AMSI). The organization was created to develop educational products for business students.

He next founded INSYTE Business Services Group and launched a project to study best practices in business process outsourcing. The result of this effort was two trade books: Business Process Outsourcing: The Competitive Advantage and The Essentials of Business Process Outsourcing. Both books were published by John Wiley & Sons in 2004 and 2005, respectively. As he was conducting the research for these books, he cofounded INSYTE InfoLabs India, Pvt. Ltd., a business process outsourcing firm based in Bangalore, India. The firm provides outsourcing services to a wide range of companies, enabling them to reduce their cost structure. Infolabs was acquired by ANSRSource in 2008.

In 2004, he accepted a position with Arizona State University's Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering as the Director of its Entrepreneurial Programs Office. In this role, he taught courses in Technology Entrepreneurship to engineers at the graduate and undergraduate levels. While at ASU he founded the Arizona Technology Investor Forum (now Arizona Tech Investors) which quickly became one of the most active angel investor groups in Arizona. He is currently involved in two ventures, Luxstone of Colorado, a home improvement company focused on selling Kohler products, and the Colorado Springs Torch Grants, a sports and lifestyle based venture attractor.

This chapter highlights what we refer to as the Five Pillars of Technology Entrepreneurship. These pillars are the fundamental tools and techniques that technology entrepreneurs should use and enact to improve the chance of success. The five pillars are: 1) Value Creation; 2) The Lean Startup; 3) Customer Discovery and Validation; 4) The Business Model Canvas; and 5) The Entrepreneurial Method. Each of these is discussed in detail in this chapter, providing readers with a thorough understanding of how to use these pillars for venture success.

Keywords

Deliberate practice

Entrepreneurial expertise

Expert technology entrepreneurs

Value proposition,

Value creation

Lean startup

Customer validation

Business model canvas

Entrepreneurial method

iWanamaker Explores Its Market Opportunity

iWanamaker is a live-scoring golf app that is designed to allow golfers to keep track of their scores on their smartphones. When founder Doyle Heisler first came up with the idea for the app, he envisioned that golfers and golf clubs would be as excited about the app as he was. When he took the app to clubs for them to use in their tournaments, he learned that club pros were reluctant to purchase it because of the low margins in the golf industry and their general aversion to innovation and change. Doyle next decided to market his product directly to the charities that run golf tournaments as fundraisers. He thought they would be interested in the product as it makes golf more fun for players and offers sponsor opportunities within the app itself. Again, however, he learned that charities are also averse to spending additional money on their golf tournaments and are indifferent to the new technology.

As a result of these two initial failures to penetrate the lucrative golf market, Doyle decided to pivot to a new business model. Realizing that the more golfers that use the product the more he can charge for advertising, he decided to experiment with a freemium business model where he would virtually give the app to golf clubs and charities, and sell advertising to local and national brands that wanted exposure to golfers. As this book is going to press, iWanamaker 2.0 is about to be released under this revised business model. Time will tell if this is the model that leads to venture growth. The important thing is that Doyle was willing to change his business model based on what the market was telling him about his product and its features.

Author Duening was an investor in and board member to iWanamaker at the time this book was going to press.

Chapter 1 examined the focus and purpose of this book and some of the leading trends and challenges for technology entrepreneurs in the modern global economy. We hope that your appetite is now whetted for a lifetime of technology entrepreneurship and that you are ready to begin learning some of the practical tools of entrepreneurial expertise. Before we begin, we must warn those of you who are novices that developing entrepreneurial expertise takes time and practice. In fact, research into what is required to become expert in anything suggests that it can take 10 years or more of what is called deliberate practice to achieve expert-level competence.1 We address the process of deliberate practice in detail later in this chapter and provide you with some suggestions about how you can develop your own entrepreneurial expertise.

The central theme of this chapter is that expert technology entrepreneurs have become adept at certain specific skills and ways of thinking about products and new ventures. These skill sets are referred to as the five pillars of…