Drawing on their own creativity, energy, and personal experience, entrepreneurs identify and seek to fill needs not currently being met by existing products or services. By doing so, they create financial/and or social value. This text examines all phases of the entrepreneurial process: ideas for something new and better than what currently exists, determining whether these ideas suggest viable business opportunities, obtaining needed financial and human resources, securing intellectual property protection, launching the new venture, developing strategies for gaining and maintaining competitive advantage, and building a customer base. In discussing these and other topics, the text draws on research findings that help identify variables that play a role in entrepreneurs’ effective performance of these tasks, and so–ultimately–in their success.