Entrepreneurship Assignment: Case Study On Kiran Mazumdar Shaw- Founder of Biocon Limited

Question

Task:
The entrepreneurship assignment consists of the following parts:

PART A: (1000 words)

• A brief introduction about an International Entrepreneur + Ventures. Should make use of IE definitions covered in class (Kirzner, Hisrich, Oviatt and Mcdougall etc.)
• IE’s motivation to set up the ventures/businesses supported by theories such as: familial influences, education, prior experience, push and pull factors, other motivational theories and concepts, etc.
• Apply trait theories to chosen IE: Are Entrepreneurs born or made? (Burns)
• Use effectuation theories by SARASVATHY, (what makes entrepreneurs Entrepreneurial? What influences their decision making?), applying whichever of the 5 Principles - Bird in hand, affordable loss, Crazy Quilt, Lemonade and Pilot in the sky - that your chosen IE may confirm to. Not all 5 principles will apply to every IE.
• What lessons can we draw from this International Entrepreneur? (Lessons learnt should have links to underlying theories and concepts related to entrepreneurs). This is not a summary of part A.

Part B: (500 words) - Themes

• Define the theme/s your chosen IE falls into using 2 or 3 definitions.
• What are the features of the chosen theme/s selected above? Apply the features to your chosen IE.
• Try to capture the current debates on the chosen theme/s in a few lines. References should be as recent as possible.
• Conclude part A and part B comparing and confirming/dis confirming whether the literature is similar with these definitions of an IE and the related themes applied.

Indicative topics for themes include (only select the theme/s that apply to your chosen IE):

1. Gender and (international) entrepreneurship
2. Family and (International) entrepreneurship
3. Financing (International entrepreneurship)
4. Technology entrepreneurship
5. Social (International) entrepreneurship
6. Habitual/Serial (Entrepreneurship)
7. Ethnicity & (International) entrepreneurship

Please note there are no other theme/s and you should only choose from the above.

References: In alphabetical order + follow Harvard ref Style.

Answer

Part A
This first part of the entrepreneurship assignment has conducted a case analysis on Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, who is a successful Indian entrepreneur.

Introduction
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is a popular Indian billionaire entrepreneur. She is the executive chairperson and founder of Biocon Biologics Limited and Biocon Limited. Biocon is a successful Indian biopharmaceutical company based in Bangalore, which was founded in the year 1978. Biocon manufactures generic active pharmaceutical ingredients, novel biologics, biosimilar insulins, and antibodies. Almost 9500 employees work for Biocon Limited and Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is successfully leading the company as an entrepreneur. International entrepreneurship is defined as the formation of a new venture on a global basis by an entrepreneur keeping international operational domain in mind. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is a successful entrepreneur because she has developed Kiran Mazumdar Shaw keeping international operational domain in mind as the manufactured products of Biocon are successfully exported to 120 countries across the world. In the year 2019, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw was listed as 68th most powerful women across the world by Forbes.

Motivation
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw believed in honesty, dedication, and hard-work. This honesty, dedication, and hard-work allowed Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to develop Biocon Limited. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw had a vision to make Biocon as one of the successful bio-pharma companies in India. Today, Biocon Limited is the leading and largest bio-pharma company of India. Today, Biocon Limited has become a successful bio-pharma company in India because of the application of push-pull factors of motivation.

Push-Pull Factors of Entrepreneurship Motivation
Initially Kiran Mazumdar Shaw was working in Biocon Biochemical Limited based in Cork, Ireland. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw agreed to the proposal of Lesile Auchincloss of starting a partnership venture in India. Under the push-full factor motivational theory of entrepreneurship, it has been identified that Kiran Mazumdar Shaw adopted both push and pull factors of motivation to do her business and gain success. In terms of push factors, affordable innovation and offering affordable drugs to the less-wealthy countries across the globe allowed Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to push the products of Biocon Limited quite successfully in the global market. In terms of pull factors, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw noticed the market potential for Statins. After the expiry of Lovastatin, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw led Biocon tried to develop other forms of statin. The demands for the cholesterol lowering drug in India and other countries across the globe were high. Looking into these market demands, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw entered into the long-term supply contracts regarding the business of statins. This strategy helped Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to pull the target audience of statin across the globe quite successfully (Mazumdar-Shaw, 2018). These strategies can easily indicate that Kiran Mazumdar Shaw adopted both push and pull factors of motivation in her entrepreneurship style to get success.

Trait Theories
The trait theory of leadership describes that some innate or inborn quality and personal characteristics make someone successful leader or successful entrepreneur. Most importantly, these inborn or innate qualities might be physical factors or intelligence factors or personality factors.

Burns’ Trait Theory
James MacGregor Burns first introduced transformational leadership theory. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw adopted transformational theory. Trait, ability, and personality of the individuals define whether an individual can become a successful leader or entrepreneur or not, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw had the visionary approach, hard-working ability, and dynamic approaches to develop a visionary organisation like Biocon Limited. Apart from these, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw successfully adopted affordable innovation depending on the demands of the people (Schoolland, 2019). Kiran Mazumdar Shaw adopted transformational approach. First of all, she adopted individualised consideration in her decision making process. For example, integration of affordable innovation in the entrepreneurship activities helped Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to pull the target market across the globe. This transformational approach made her a successful entrepreneur.

It is her inborn quality or personality trait to adopt innovation in decision making style, entrepreneurship activities, and leadership process. Secondly, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw also focuses on consideration of inspirational motivation in her entrepreneurial activities. Majority of the stakeholders including employees of Biocon Limited are highly motivated by the leadership style of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw as she always takes care of professional and personal needs of important stakeholders. Sustainable changes in leadership style are the major characteristic of the entrepreneurship approach of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw. It indicates that Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is a born leader, not a made leader because of her natural dynamic leadership capabilities (Mazumdar-Shaw, 2018).

Effectuation Theory
The Effectuation Theory proposed by Saras Sarasvathy describes an approach to make decisions and perform actions in entrepreneurship process. This theory helps the individuals to determine the best entrepreneurship practices by assessing the availability of the resources. There are five principles of effectuation, such as Bird-in-hand, Lemonade Principle, Crazy Quilt, Affordable Loss, and Pilot in the Sky.

Crazy Quilt
After the thorough investigation and assessment, it can be stated that the entrepreneurship style and decision making model of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw follows Crazy Quilt Effectuation Principle. The Biocon Limited led by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw has done successful partnerships with Serum Institute Life Sciences Private Limited. In addition, State Government of Karnataka and Central Government of India are also important stakeholders of Biocon Limited led by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Lahiry and Rangarajan, 2019). The principle of Crazy Quilt states that an organisation gets new project funds and new business directions by entering into new partnerships. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw has capitalised on this opportunity created by Crazy Quilt principle of decision making and entrepreneurship.

Lessons
From the assessment and analysis of entrepreneurship approach and leadership style of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, it can be learnt that an individual can become a successful leader if that particular individual has a long-term vision. In this case, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is a visionary leader with transformational skills. It is also important to have dynamic decision making skills and ability to drive innovation to make a venture successful. The affordable innovation adopted by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw allowed Biocon Limited to become one of the successful companies in India. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is a born leader because she already had influential personality traits from initial days of entrepreneurship (Rao and Shravan, 2018).

Part B
This part of the assignment has discussed different entrepreneurship themes Kiran Mazumdar Shaw fall into. The features of those themes are also discussed in this assignment. Current debates on this aspect are highlighted in this part of the assignment.

Definition of Themes
The entrepreneurship approach of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw has three important themes, such as gender entrepreneurship, financing entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship.

Gender entrepreneurship can be defined as entrepreneurship approach through which entrepreneurs maintain equality, inclusion, and empowerment of employees of all the gender orientations in the workplace (Piramal, 2018). On the other hand, financing entrepreneurship is the study of resource application and value consideration, which is considered for the new organisations. Lastly, social entrepreneurship is all about recognising social challenges and initiating changes by applying different influential entrepreneurship processes and principles. All of these entrepreneurship themes are identified in the entrepreneurship style of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, which are discussed below.

Features of Chosen Themes
First of all, knowledge, integrity, initiative, inclusion, empowerment, motivation skills, sense of equality, communication skills, and self-confidence are some important features of gender entrepreneurship. These features are significantly identified in the entrepreneurship style of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw. Secondly, extensive knowledge on needs of customers, knowledge on existing social challenges, knowledge on external environmental situations, and ability to initiate positive social changes are some important features of social entrepreneurship. These features are also identified in the entrepreneurship style of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw (Chauhan, 2022). Lastly, flexibility, positive attitudes, resource application, ad value consideration are the important features of entrepreneurship, which is applied by Kiran Mazumdar to get financial supports from international investors. These features are identified in the entrepreneurship approach of Kiran Mazumdar, which can be seen in financing entrepreneurship.

Current Debates
In terms of current debates, several industry professionals and scholars have accepted the influential women entrepreneurs are applying innovations as a major aspect of gender entrepreneurship to ensure competitive advantages for their ventures. The current scholars and industry experts also have acknowledged that the current women entrepreneurs are applying transformational leadership style to bring positive changes in the decision making process as major aspect of social entrepreneurship approach (Kumari and Venkatesh, 2018). Lastly, the current researchers and experts also accepted that successful women entrepreneurs in contemporary era are significantly capitalise on potential market opportunities to ensure effective financing for their venture, which comes under financing international entrepreneurship. These are three important criterions to get success.

Conclusion
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is a successful entrepreneur because of significant consideration of push-pull motivational strategy. Influential interpersonal traits have allowed Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to become an inborn entrepreneur. Biocon Limited led by Kiran Mazumdar Shaw has made successful partnership with other leading firms. On the other hand, State Government as well as Central Government is important stakeholders. These partnerships have allowed Kiran Mazumdar Shaw to get sufficient fund to establish creative manufacturing units. Most importantly, the entrepreneurship style of Kiran Mazumdar Shaw is based on three important themes, such as gender entrepreneurship, social entrepreneurship, and financing entrepreneurship.

References
Chauhan, B., 2022. Role of Women Entrepreneurs in Indian Economy: A Perspective. Journal of Commerce and Trade, 15(1), pp.49-53.

Kumari, R.L. and Venkatesh, J., 2018. A Case Study on Women Entrepreneurship and the Opportunity to Promote India’s Development. International Journal of Human Resource Management and Research (IJHRMR), 8, pp.27-34.

Lahiry, S.R. and Rangarajan, K., 2019. Strategic use of patents by an entrepreneurial multinational organisation in Indian context. Journal for Global Business Advancement, 12(3), pp.356-381.

Mazumdar-Shaw, K., 2018. 25 Years of Reforms that Led India’s Pharmaceutical and Biotech Industry towards Global Leadership. India Transformed: Twenty-Five Years of Economic Reforms, p.569.

Mazumdar-Shaw, K., 2018. Leveraging affordable innovation to tackle India's healthcare challenge. Entrepreneurship assignment IIMB Management Review, 30(1), pp.37-50.

Piramal, G., 2018. Animal Spirits: Stray Thoughts on the Nature of Entrepreneurship in India’s Business Families after Liberalization. India Transformed: Twenty-Five Years of Economic Reforms, p.485.

Rao, P.B. and Shravan, M.A., 2018. Women Empowerment to Women Entrepreneurship–A Success Story of Karnataka. International Journal of Applied Engineering Research, 13(23), pp.16683-16687.

Schoolland, K., 2019. Inspiration in India for a New Generation of Entrepreneurs. Education About ASIA, 24(2).