Was seeing a TV show yesterday, and one of the people (now, an entrepreneur) mentioned that in his past jobs, he had always taken a goal and then given the resources at hand, had tried to make the best of it — and in that sense those jobs themselves were very entrepreneurial… Got me to think who is an entrepreneur? Especially, now that one keeps hearing about intrapreneurship, social entrepreneurship, etc.
I am a pretty black and white guy on this — you have either put yourselves on the block to realise a dream, or you haven’t. What do you think? and what are the strangest interpretations of entrepreneurship you have heard?
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An entrepreneur is someone who thinks he is smarter than the status quo wisdom of the market. Then he goes about outsmarting the market using the building blocks available in the market. When this outsmarting becomes sustainable, he is successful. When it becomes scalable then he is a run away hit.
In my view a true entrepreneur is the one who has a genuine attitude to serve people. Again there are two kinds of entrepreneurs – entrepreneurs who create products for a common man and entrepreneurs who create products for business customers. The second type is usually done in universities or guys who have years of experience working in established companies.
Most importantly an entrepreneur has a certain vision. He has a certain perspective of what should be done and what should not be done. He believes what he percieves to be the truth around him to be the truth and he goes out to prove to the people what the truth is.
An entrepreneur has the ability to see symmetric patterns in haphazard market situations.
Oh! I know this one 😉 Sorry for textbook answers – I’m actually writting a textbook on this (amongst other things).
There is a specific answer to your question. It starts with a problem followed by a solution.
The problem is that the academic field of entrepreneurship education, has not come up with a general theory of entrepreneurship (like the equivalent of modern portfolio theory) to give prescriptive (rather than descriptive) definitions of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. If one cares to know, right now, entrepreneurship is taught as a process (i.e. entrepreneurs accept risk to create value yada yada yada). This doesn’t explain anything. It describes rather than prescribes.
The solution is redefining entrepreneurship as a roles based (rather than process based) occupation. To that end, there are four roles common to all entrepreneurs and you basically know you’re an entrepreneur when you find your self doing these four roles. The point being is that the word “entrepreneur” has no meaning on it’s own. It’s just shorthand for describing four very specific other jobs.
1) Role as an investor: If you are weighing up risk/return profiles and doing due diligence to figure out if one venture is worth pursuing over another – you’re an entrepreneur.
2) Foundership: If you’ve identified a problem and are using leverage to harness resources currently outside of your control to deliver an elegant solution to the problem- you’re an entrepreneur.
3) CEO: If you’re thinking about risk management and how to prevent your start-up from screwing up – you’re an entrepreneur.
4) Directorship: If you’re in board meetings trying to vote on strategic direction for your start up – you’re an entrepreneur.
If you’re not doing all of those four things – then you must be something else.
I remember having attended a session on entrepreneurship a few years back. I picked up a lot from that session. A faculty member at IIT Delhi (Prof. Kushal Sen for those who would know) was on the Dias and was speaking on how he wished he could have been an entrepreneur too. Later in the session, an entrepreneur pointed out how Kushal actually was one bcos he was trying to work on various fronts for the betterment of IITD. He believed that it was infact a more entrepreneurial job bcos Kushal has to work under far more resource and protocol constraints, and with far less incentives.
Inspired from that and other observations, i do believe that as against the popular perception, the concept of entrepreneurship is not necessarily restricted to:
1] For profit organisations
Eg: Metro:E Sridharan
Eg: Missionaries (RSS Shakhas; Catholic)
2] Small to Big journey (it could be big to bigger, or size independent)
Eg: A farmer using a water pump to double up as engine for tractor.
Eg: Increasing the sales of the market leading detergent soap by another 1%.
I think what is both a necessary and sufficient condition for any facet of entrepreneurship is:
1] having a vision/mission/idea (essentially a belief)
AND
2] taking initiative to aggressively pursue it
Would like to hear if there is something extra that i am including or excluding.
I personally believe there are lot of companies allow you to think of new ideas, propose them, get resources and deliver it. You don’t have to worry too much about sales though but many a time you get that chance too and run it completely. I have personally worked in two such places. After this i got a chance to run a company in a typical enterpreneur mode. I believe the only difference was that i had much more legal ownership in the two cases. I personally find not too much of a difference except that you are not really at home when you come home ;-). And a hope (only hope) to make it big someday. And ofcourse new people who meet you behave as if you are like some oscar holder (huh!)
http://blog.360.yahoo.com/blog-JOxIXmQjfqfLj8YvrOwtzuL97Q–?p=13