Many people around the world want to start their own business. In Mexico alone, the 2021 Business Demography Survey, conducted and published by the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), revealed that 1.2 million micro, small, and medium enterprises were started that year.

What’s more, these businesses generate 72% of jobs in the country and contribute to around 52% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), according to data from the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO).

If we want our business to follow a positive path, both for ourselves and for the people supporting us, it’s necessary for us to understand some basic concepts before setting it up (and even once it’s up and running).

Entrepreneurship concepts that will help you with your business

Entrepreneurship is an activity involving the process of creating a new company or business, as well as expanding an existing one, maintaining a close relationship with a country’s economic dynamics and social development, and fostering an entrepreneurial culture.

According to the Experiences and Good Practices of Corporate Venture Capital in Mexico survey, carried out by Tecnológico de Monterrey’s EGADE Business School and the Mexican Association of Private Equity (AMEXCAP), innovation and adapting to a much more dynamic and demanding environment are among the strategic challenges currently faced by organizations.

This has led to the emergence of the term corporate entrepreneurship, which is understood as a set of strategies and practices used by companies in search of new business opportunities, with the aim of promoting and managing entrepreneurial skills in companies and making their development more sustainable.

Continuing with the key definitions related to this activity, here’s a list of 20 entrepreneurship concepts that will help you with your business:

1. Strategic Cooperation Agreement: partnerships between established corporations and startups to design, develop, and test innovative solutions by discovering new opportunities or taking advantage of existing ones.
2. Bootcamp: events of a competitive and temporary nature, during which students participate in multidisciplinary teams and are trained to generate new ideas and proposals to resolve specific challenges or issues.
3. Corporate Venture Capital (CVC): investments in startups for innovation or for some other strategic goal, beyond just a financial return.
4. Deal Flow: a set of projects or investment alternatives that reach a capital fund or group of investors or venture capitalists to study their investment potential.
5. Due Diligence: an investigation or audit that examines the different areas of a company in detail to determine whether it’s complying with its obligations and whether there are any substantial legal risks arising from its activity.
6. Family Offices: a company created with the aim of managing a family’s wealth and ensuring its sustainability over time.
7. Footprint: this is the geographical scope of a company’s operation: local, regional, national, or international.
8. Corporate Venturing: a cooperation framework between established companies and startups that innovate on strategic verticals to shorten the time to market.
9. Captive Fund: a private fund that is managed on behalf of a select group of investors or in affiliation with a single entity.
10. Hackathon: a contest in which entrepreneurs collaborate to find technology solutions to business innovation challenges in a given time. It’s a way of distilling visionary concepts down to actionable solutions, stimulating creative thinking and problem-solving within corporations.
11. Hub: a place where entrepreneurs work together and form a community. Their influence turns cities where they’re set up into leading centers for entrepreneurship.
12. Business Incubator / Accelerator: mentorship and value-added services to help entrepreneurs create viable, market-ready ideas. These services tend to focus on the early stage, turning entrepreneurs’ ideas into real business models.
13. Liabilities: uncertainty and risk in a corporation or company’s investment, resource, procedure, or asset, where new skills were expected to be incorporated.
14. Limited Partner (LP): a business partner who has no management authority or personal liability.
15. Meet-ups: this is a way to meet business owners, entrepreneurs, or professionals working in areas or technologies of mutual interest.
16. Pitch Day: a date designated for entrepreneurs and their startups, at different stages of development and maturity, to make elevator pitches and find investors.
17. Return on Investment (ROI): a financial ratio that compares the benefit or return obtained in relation to the investment made. It’s a metric to analyze a company’s performance from a financial point of view.
18. Scouting: an agent reporting to a corporation with the mission of identifying innovation opportunities aligned with the corporate strategy within a given industry.
19. Screening: a strategy to avoid bad choices when making a decision.
20. Startup: a company that is in the early stage of operation with a strong technology base.