Entrepreneurship is the dynamic process of creating incremental wealth. The wealth is created by individuals who assume the major risks in terms of equity, time and/or career commitment or provide value for some product or service. The product or service may or may not be new or unique, but value must somehow be infused by the entrepreneur by receiving and locating the necessary skills and resources efficiently and effectively.
Entrepreneurship is thus considered as the process of creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial, psychic, and social risks, and receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence that comes with it.
This definition stresses four basic aspects of being an entrepreneur regardless of the field. First, entrepreneurship involves the creation process, creating something new of value. The creation has to have value to the entrepreneur and value to the audience for which it is developed. This audience could be
- The market of organizational buyers for business innovation,
- The hospital’s administration for a new admitting procedure and software,
- Prospective students for a new course or even college of entrepreneurship, or
- The constituency for a new service provided by a non-profit agency.
Secondly, entrepreneurship requires the devotion of the necessary time and effort. Only those going through the entrepreneurial process appreciate the significant amount of time and effort it takes to create something new and make it operational.
For the person who actually starts his or her own business, the experience is filled with enthusiasm, frustration, anxiety, and hard work. There is a high failure rate due to such things as poor sales, intense competition, lack of capital, or lack of managerial ability. The financial and emotional risk can also be very high. What, then, causes a person to make this difficult decision? The question can be best explored by looking at the decision process involved in becoming an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship is an essential element for economic progress as it manifests its fundamental importance in different ways by:
- Identifying, assessing and exploiting business opportunities;
- Creating new firms and/or renewing existing ones by making them more dynamic; and
- Driving the economy forward through innovation, competence, job creation and by generally improving the wellbeing of society.
Entrepreneurship is the active process of recognising an economic demand in an economy, and supplying the factors of production (land, labour and capital) to satisfy that demand, usually to generate a profit. High levels of poverty combined with slow economic growth in the formal sector have forced a large part of the developing world’s population into self-employment and informal activities. But this is not necessarily negative; microenterprises contribute significantly to economic growth, social stability and equity.
The sector is one of the most important vehicles through which low-income people can escape poverty. With limited skills and education to compete for formal sector jobs, these men and women find economic opportunities in microenterprises as business owners and employees. If successful, entrepreneurship is likely to result in a small- to medium-enterprise (SME). They include a variety of firms; village handicrafts makers, small machine shops, restaurants, and computer software firms etc. that possess a wide range of sophistication and skills, and operate in very different markets and social environments.
