Characteristics of Entrepreneurship

What is Entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship refers to the ability to develop, organize, and run a new business with the capacity of bearing the risk and dealing with uncertainties to make profits. The person who starts a new business is known as an entrepreneur. The concept of entrepreneurship was introduced by Joseph Alois Schumpeter who is known as the father of entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship can be of various types such as social entrepreneurship, small business entrepreneurship, scalable start-up entrepreneurship, large company entrepreneurship, technical entrepreneurship, environmental entrepreneurship, etc. Entrepreneurship plays a very crucial role in the development of society and the country by providing jobs, introducing innovation, supporting research and development, etc.

Entrepreneurship is the ability of a person to develop, organize, and run a new venture along with market uncertainties to bring something new to society and earn more and more profit. But it is not an easy task for an entrepreneur to become successful in a new business. Entrepreneurship can be run successfully if it has certain characteristics. These characteristics are given below:

1. Curiosity

It is a very common characteristic that makes an entrepreneur successful. The ability of curiosity helps entrepreneurs to search for new and profitable opportunities everywhere. Entrepreneurship never allows ignoring new things and missing the opportunities. A curious entrepreneur always asks questions, push his/her limits, and explores various avenues but never settles the things and makes adjustments. Without having curiosity, one can easily overlook valuable discoveries.

2. Structured Experimentation

It is also one of the most important characteristics of entrepreneurship. An entrepreneur must test every new opportunity to determine whether it is profitable to invest in that opportunity or not. For example, if an entrepreneur got an idea to develop an innovative product or service that can fulfill the underserved demand of the market, the entrepreneur should first figure out whether the customers want to pay for it or not. To know this, the entrepreneur can conduct research and run meaningful tests.

3. Adaptability

The business environment changes continuously which makes it difficult for an entrepreneur to adapt to it. They face new challenges every day but also get many opportunities. However, it is very hard for an entrepreneur to get ready for every scenario, evaluate them, and adapt them so that the business can't be affected by these unexpected changes. But to be successful in the market they should closely analyze the environment and adapt to every possible change.

4. Decisiveness

It is not easy for an entrepreneur to run a business. He/she has to make difficult decisions and stand by them for being successful. Here, decisiveness does not mean that the entrepreneur must have the answer to all questions. Instead of it, decisiveness means the entrepreneur should be ready to face any problem, take any difficult decisions, and execute them without any carelessness. In case, the actual outcome is less than the expected outcome then corrective measures should also be taken.

5. Team Building

A great entrepreneur always collects information about their strengths and weaknesses. They build a team of highly skilled professionals who can help the organization in overcoming the problems and also avoiding shortcomings. A perfect team is the most important aspect for a business to be successful in the competitive business environment. Success can not be achieved by the efforts of an individual rather than; it is teamwork that drives the venture to success. However, it is not an easy task for an entrepreneur to surround himself/herself with teammates who have complementary talents and can contribute to the common goals of the organization instead of giving priority to their individual goals.

6. Risk Tolerance

Risk and profit are the two sides of a coin and every entrepreneur should be ready to bear the risk also. But it is not enough. The entrepreneur should try to minimize the risk also. In a new venture, many things can happen against the plan but many things happen as per the plan also.

Successful entrepreneurs should be comfortable in taking risks to make a profit. He/she should actively manage the relationship between risk and reward and increase the returns of the company. However, the level of risk that an entrepreneur can take is completely based on their efforts to mitigate it.

7. Comfortable With Failure

Success and failure always move together. If an entrepreneur is getting success then it does not mean that he/she can't get failure at all. But a successful entrepreneur is that who deals with failure without being disappointed and learns from them. If the entrepreneur gets demotivated by the failure then it can affect the working efficiency of the employees which can be very harmful to the business. Other than this, failures can also become a hurdle in taking calculated decisions.

As per some estimation, nearly 75% of entrepreneurs fail because they don't know how to deal with failures and they have a lack motivation. Because such entrepreneurs want to be successful over the night.

8. Persistence

It is not only enough to be comfortable with the failures. A successful entrepreneur always should see the failures as opportunities to make a come back with strong plans. During the process of entrepreneurship, many hypotheses made by the entrepreneur turn out to be wrong, and also some ventures get failed. But what makes an entrepreneur successful is their learning from their previous mistakes, not repeating them, and persisting until they reach their goal.

9. Long-term Focus

According to most people, entrepreneurship is all about starting a new venture only. But the actual work begins after starting the business. Once the business is operational, the entrepreneur can't stop and lose focus. As we learned, it is easy to start a job but difficult to do it regularly. In the same manner, a business can be started easily but it is difficult to run it regularly for a long period.

The entrepreneur should have a long-term vision and focus for the business. It is not necessary that short-term success can be favorable for the business in the long run. The path to success, in the long run, is much more difficult, and to achieve that success the entrepreneur should be enough motivated and should have all the above-given qualities or characteristics.

10. Innovation

Innovation and entrepreneurship go hand in hand, i.e., entrepreneurship is incomplete without innovation. It is often seen some new entrepreneurs come into the business of an existing product or service and drastically improve it to meet the changing needs of the customers.

It is an important characteristic of entrepreneurship but all start-ups do not possess innovation. An entrepreneur can be well equipped to capture innovative opportunities by developing strategic thinking skills. This will be further beneficial for the success of the organization.