MNG91002 Assignment 1: Fairphone Case Study Entrepreneurship Report

This report analyzes the entrepreneurial traits and challenges faced by Fairphone, an ethical smartphone company. The report begins with an executive summary, followed by an introduction that outlines the purpose of the analysis and introduces the case study of Fairphone. The discussion section dissects key entrepreneurial characteristics such as passion, innovation, risk-taking, leadership, ethics, resilience, and flexibility, illustrating these traits through the actions of Fairphone's founder, Bas Van Abel. The analysis further explores the challenges inherent in social entrepreneurship, including balancing vision and business goals, adapting to change, scalability issues, and the impact of competition. The conclusion summarizes the significant entrepreneurial traits and the obstacles encountered in social ventures, drawing insights from the Fairphone case. The report is supported by academic references to provide a comprehensive understanding of entrepreneurship within the context of Fairphone's ethical business model.

Running head: ENTREPRENEURSHIP
ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Executive Summary:
The purpose of the paper is to discuss and assess entrepreneurship traits in regards to the
selected case study of Fairphone. The paper indicated a series of traits including flexibility,
innovation, strong vision, leadership qualities and values of ethics and integrity. The paper
also discussed regarding the qualities the entrepreneur of Fairphone possesses. The paper also
discussed regarding the challenges of social entrepreneurship mainly, misbalances of vision
and business, increasing competition and challenges of scalability. The paper concluded by
summarizing the paint points such as the significant traits of entrepreneurs and challenges of
social entrepreneurship was indicated.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................3
Analysis of Entrepreneur traits/characteristics:..................................................................3
Major Boundaries or Challenges in Social Entrepreneurship:..........................................6
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8
References:.................................................................................................................................9

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Introduction
Entrepreneurship involves the process of constructing new business by considering
various risks for a rewarding outcome. The procedure of entrepreneurship includes the
implication of innovation and services for operating a business phenomenon (Burns and
Dewhurst 2016.). The purpose of the paper is to assess general entrepreneurial traits followed
by the identification of the traits in the Fairphone case study. The paper will also reflect the
challenges encircling social entrepreneurship. The chosen case study is Fairphone, an ethical
cell phone, which is framed for changing the smartphone’s future. This case reflects the
process of becoming entrepreneurs in context of manufacturing of an ethical line and product
of a smartphone.
Discussion
Analysis of Entrepreneur traits/characteristics:
The characteristics and traits are the elements that distinguish entrepreneurs from
business owners, traits stimulates the initiatives and maintains the urge of creating or
supporting an innovating idea. The below mentioned traits are usually found amongst
entrepreneurs:
 Passion and Vision: The vision of an entrepreneur should be transparent with the
capability of planning both short-term and long-term objectives. Integrating passion
with respect to the new initiative or new idea is crucial for enabling a potentially
successful business operation.
 Innovation: The ability to innovate and participate activity in the process of
innovation is considered one of the main characteristics of establishing a start-up
(Eckhardt, Ciuchta and Carpenter 2018). The innovation characteristics may involve a

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range of actions including, innovative promotional forms, marketing strategies and
production process.
 Risk-taking capability: Risk taking ability is one of the most crucial characteristics of
an entrepreneur as entrepreneurs needs to adopt a range of risks for starting a business
from scratch and accommodating resources for a successful turn of strategies.
 Leadership qualities: Leadership qualities are considered as critical for
entrepreneurship as it can reflect the capability of motivating workforce and suppliers
with action of applying skills and knowledge on the business. Effective leadership
skills such as offering assistance as a guide during challenges, strong communication
skills, with the ability of integrating positive environment with working qualities
(Karabulut 2016).
 Ethical: Integrity and ethics are considered as the base of a successful business
operation in the purview of long-term business. Compromising on the traits of moral
and ethical decision-making abilities will not result in a successful sustainable
business. Only ethical entrepreneurs are able to establish a credible business.
 Resilience: This entrepreneurial trait is necessary and indicates high level of
determination. Resilience demonstrates the ability to surpass failures with similar
degree of passion and confidence (Parker 2018).
 Flexibility: Along with the ability to manage failures, an effective entrepreneur should
also demonstrate the ability to accept challenges and hurdles along the way of
accomplishing long-term goals (Wang et al. 2016).
In the case of Fairphone, the actions and decisions of Bas Van Abel depicts necessary
entrepreneurial traits, which helped in the successful operations and business administration
of the business. The entrepreneurial traits, which can be linked to the characteristics of Bas
Van Abel, are as follows:

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 Bas Van Abel reflects a clear vision of promoting and establishing an ethical line of
smartphones without compromising on the core moral values. He prepared the ethical
grounds and then built the business operations by improving, replacing and addressing
ethical gaps. With the passion of replacing the unethical production process involved
in manufacturing a smartphone, the entrepreneurial venture of Fairphone was started
by Bas Van Abel (Studybreaks.com 2018).
 Innovation: Through the case study of Fairphone, it can be deduced that the whole
process of promoting the idea to manufacturing smartphone with maximum ethical
practices, Bas Van Abel was able to incorporate innovation of replacing unethical and
unsustainable practices with innovating skills.
 Integrity and ethics: The case demonstrates a clear existence of the characteristics of
entrepreneurial traits of ethics and integrity. Bas Van Abel was able to base the
complete operational process with the integration of ethical practices and integrity.
Ethical production process without exploitation of resources by building long lasting
phones and by responding to the worker exploitation concerns through the growth
agenda reflects the entrepreneurial traits (Studybreaks.com 2018). Another decision or
actions of Bas Van Abel involves the decision of declining a newer release, Fairphone
3 due to the improvement of Fair phone 2 is a sign of integrity.
 Flexibility: The case also represents the enterperneur’s ability to incorporate
flexibility in the vision and functions. Bas Van Abel acknowledges the ethical
concerns with respect to the sourcing of resources and production process and
demonstrates the urge of changing business strategies for a complete sustainable and
ethical venture. Even the improvement of Fairphone 2 model is a sign of implying
flexibility.

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Major Boundaries or Challenges in Social Entrepreneurship:
Social entrepreneurship demonstrates the approach and intension of group, institution
and individual in developing a venture, which resolve concerns or addresses solutions to
environment, cultural and/or social issues. The selected case study of Fairphone demonstrates
the operation of a social entrepreneurship venture in which although, it operates with the
intention of stimulating profit, but it functions with the vision of improving the impact of
unethical and environmentally unsustainable for manufacturing smartphones
(Studybreaks.com 2018). Even with positive motives, social entrepreneurship experiences
challenges and boundaries including:
 Balance and alignment between the vision and business: This is one of the prime
challenges of a social entrepreneurial venture, as social entrepreneurial may face the
concern of striking an efficient balance between the vision of societal or
environmental improvement and to the need or criteria of maintaining profit. The
challenge of retaining the purpose projects boundaries of extending operational
activities and maintaining cause with business profits.
 Delay or Resistance in incorporating change: Although, establishing a social
entrepreneurial venture is necessary for growth of communities and nation but
changing the behaviour (buying frequency of smartphones) and thinking (ethical and
long-lasting equals out-dated phones) of the target consumers is very challenging. The
process of spreading awareness and knowledge regarding the process of ethical and
sustainable business operation can be challenging.
 Scalability: The aspect of scalability can be another concern or issue with social
entrepreneurship. The measurement and maintenance of optimum scalability with
respect to organizational scale and impact is challenging due to the misbalance

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between market demand and resource capabilities or/and operational values (Ahlgren
2017).
 Concern with diversification: Although, diversification is known to incorporate
scalable commercial benefits but there are risks and boundaries of employing
financial advice, training programs and sourcing resources, especially in case of a new
busies owner with limited funds and experience (Read et al. 2016).
 Elevating competition in 21st century: The increasing competition in various
industries, especially in case of smartphone businesses. Social enterprises
incorporates lower pricing strategies such as in case of Fairphone, but increasing
competition can impose challenges of maintaining the lower price from the
perspective of business and can blur the line in the understanding of ethical and
unethical businesses amongst customers (Goyal, Sergi and Jaiswal 2016). Moreover,
new ventures of social entrepreneurship also experiences the pressure of establishing
a reputable and profitable business with the positive impact in a vast range of society
and environment, which can be challenged by the elevating competition rate.
 Maintaining productivity and values: The increasing demand of offerings of a social
enterprise can project boundaries with respect to following the core values of ethics
and sustainability (Baporikar 2017).
 Lack in evidences: Primary challenge especially in relation to the case can be lack of
experience for establishing a social entrepreneurial venture and secondly, the lack in
existent evidences can result in unrealistic projection of impact and growth. Although,
newer ideas and approach reflects the need of market to improve and grow but due to
the newness in the idea, the social entrepreneur may find the operation challenging in
the lack of any reference and measuring criteria of success.

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Conclusion
Therefore, it can be concluded from the paper that entrepreneurship is a process of
incorporating changes in the market, society and globe with the positive influence over the
external environment through newer ideas or approach or initiative of producing offerings.
Entrepreneurs are capable of establishing impact with the help of traits such as, passion,
flexibility, innovation, strong vision with integrity and ethical values. In this paper, the case
of Fairphone, an ethical smartphone-manufacturing venture was assessed in terms of the
entrepreneurial traits of its owner. The case also demonstrated the challenges of operating a
social enterprise like Fairphone, mainly indicated the challenge of misbalance between profit
and vision.

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References:
Ahlgren, J., 2017. Key Factors and Challenges of Scaling Up in Social Entrepreneurship-A
Case Study of Successful Social Enterprises.
Baporikar, N., 2017. Boundaries and challenges for social entrepreneurship.
In Entrepreneurship: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications (pp. 379-399). IGI
Global.
Burns, P. and Dewhurst, J. eds., 2016. Small business and entrepreneurship. Macmillan
International Higher Education.
Eckhardt, J.T., Ciuchta, M.P. and Carpenter, M., 2018. Open innovation, information, and
entrepreneurship within platform ecosystems. Strategic entrepreneurship journal, 12(3),
pp.369-391.
Goyal, S., Sergi, B.S. and Jaiswal, M.P., 2016. Understanding the challenges and strategic
actions of social entrepreneurship at base of the pyramid. Management Decision.
Karabulut, A.T., 2016. Personality traits on entrepreneurial intention. Procedia-Social and
Behavioral Sciences, 229, pp.12-21.
Parker, S.C., 2018. The economics of entrepreneurship. Cambridge University Press.
Read, S., Sarasvathy, S., Dew, N. and Wiltbank, R., 2016. Effectual entrepreneurship. Taylor
& Francis.

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Studybreaks.com 2018. Study Breaks. Fairphone, The Ethical Cell Phone, Wants To Change
The Future Of Smartphones. [Online] Available at: https://studybreaks.com/tvfilm/is-
fairphone-changing-the-future-of-smartphones/
Wang, J.H., Chang, C.C., Yao, S.N. and Liang, C., 2016. The contribution of self-efficacy to
the relationship between personality traits and entrepreneurial intention. Higher
Education, 72(2), pp.209-224.