Introduction
Business teams need to achieve goals and create and protect value. This response focuses on five skills that studies propose as the prerequisites to success.
Discussion: Skills to Have on the Team
Creativity
Creativity is known as the ability to produce valuable and different results in a consistent manner (Drucker, 2015; Hisrich and Kearney, 2014). As per Maaravi et al. (2020), the generation of creative ideas fuels value creation in business contexts. This could make the concept form the basis of the definitions of innovation. The emphasis on fostering creativity finds reflection in training games for business teams and students, for instance, FreshBiz (Maaravi et al., 2020).
Dealing with Failure
In the current literature, skills linked with overcoming failure are reported to maximize teams’ success in value creation. Maaravi et al. (2020) theorize that such skills are among the central components of “teaching for entrepreneurship” (p. 218). Some reasons for their importance might include a 50% closure rate of new companies during five years (Triebel et al., 2018). The concept’s disadvantages include the lack of a mutually agreed definition of coping with failure, which has implications for practice.
Understanding the Link between Economic and Social Value
The third skill critical to value creation and protection refers to understanding the theoretical concept of double materiality. The concept suggests a two-way relationship between economic and social value: financial materiality involves the identification of societal trends affecting the business’s performance, whereas social/environmental materiality is about understanding the business’s effects on society (Kurznack, Schoenmaker and Schramade, 2021). Unfortunately, the concept’s nature might hinder the formulation of specific skill development practices for real-life contexts.
Project Planning Skills
Project planning (PP) skills that have been shown to depend on technical skills promote value creation and entrepreneurial projects’ success (Ateng, 2018; Vujović et al., 2020). The theory of constraints suggests that each process has one specific constraint to be addressed to increase the output, and the lack of people with PP competencies could be a common limiting constraint (Ateng, 2018).
Understanding the Needs of Customers
Finally, as per the agency theory, businesses create and retain value for their owners or cease their operations (Windsor, 2017). Considering this, skills that actively promote revenue generation, such as understanding the target customer’s needs and expectations, should be conducive to value creation and goal achievement.
Reference List
Ateng, D. (2018) Influence of project planning skills on implementation of entrepreneurship projects in Kenya: a case of Juakali Sector in Kenya. Master’s Thesis. University of Nairobi. Web.
Drucker, P.F. (2015) Innovation and entrepreneurship: practice and principles. Abingdon: Routledge Classics.
Hisrich, R. D. and Kearney, C. (2014) Managing innovation and entrepreneurship. London: Sage Publications.
Kurznack, L., Schoenmaker, D. and Schramade, W. (2021) ‘A model of long-term value creation’, Journal of Sustainable Finance & Investment, pp. 1-19. Web.
Maaravi, Y. et al. (2020) ‘Training techniques for entrepreneurial value creation’, Entrepreneurship Education, 3(2), pp. 215-238. Web.
Triebel, C. et al. (2018) ‘Failure in startup companies: why failure is a part of founding’, in Kunert, S. (ed.) Strategies in failure management. Springer: Cham, pp. 121-140.
Vujović, V. et al. (2020) ‘Project planning and risk management as a success factor for IT projects in agricultural schools in Serbia’, Technology in Society, 63, pp. 1-5. Web.
Windsor, D. (2017) ‘Value creation theory: literature review and theory assessment’, Business and Society, 360(1), pp. 75–100. Web.