Exploring the marketing - entrepreneurship interface: bringing an understanding of small business marketing into the curriculum

The success of small firms worldwide is determined by entrepreneurship and marketing (Hills, 1995). 95% of firms worldwide are small (less than 250 employees) – and often smaller than that. Marketing and entrepreneurship are not the same but they are interconnected. Consider Apple, the fabled 1970’s ‘garage’ start-up by Wozniak and Jobs. Often great innovators but not always great entrepreneurs. That is until they revolutionised the music industry with iTunes, and in the future, may well revolutionise personal computing with the iPad.

This paper considers the authors’ experience over the last decade in teaching what can be called entrepreneurial marketing. Given our belief, which is surprisingly common, that entrepreneurship is to some extent learnable and thus teachable – it is both ‘nature and nurture’ … we share our experience of our module – Marketing of Small Business. Our research interests both feed into, and draw from, our teaching on this final year module.