“The fundamental ingredient is to get off your butt and do something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but few decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week, but today. The true entrepreneur He is a doer, not a dreamer.” Nolan Bushnellfounder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s
This is what entrepreneurship is all about. You need to have ‘fire in your stomach’ to be a successful entrepreneur; the unwavering drive to make your business ideas come true and successful. According to Peter Drucker, entrepreneurship is “systematic innovation, which consists in the organized and determined search for change, and is the systematic analysis of the opportunities that such changes may offer for economic and social innovation”. It is the inherent ability to build and create something relevant and successful from practically nothing. In a broader perspective, entrepreneurship is an attitude; a quality for seeking out challenging opportunities, taking only calculated risks and driving profits in the way of establishing a profitable company.
There are various roles that come with the quality of entrepreneurship, and most of these are intended for broader socio-economic development. The main functions of an entrepreneur are discussed below.
Entrepreneur as risk taker.
According to Richard Cantillon, entrepreneurship is about having the will and foresight to take risks, while taking calculated action for profit or loss. According to him, an entrepreneur must be risk-taking, forward-looking and efficiently alert, if not innovative in the strict sense. The role of an entrepreneur involves two types of risks; measured and unmeasured. However, a successful entrepreneur is one who has the potential to anticipate and assume the excessive risks of their business, transforming them into business opportunities for growth and profitability.
Entrepreneur as Innovator.
Entrepreneurship has an important role in the assimilation of knowledge, which is not of recent use, and the establishment of new forms and functions of production to design, produce and market new and innovative products. Joseph Schumpeter pointed out here that innovation does not mean that it has to be newly discovered. The quality of an entrepreneur lies in using existing knowledge that has never before been used in production. In addition to being an inventor, an entrepreneur must possess the potential to push the invention into lucrative commercial exploitation.
Entrepreneur as a leader.
This is one of the main functions of entrepreneurship. According to Alfred Marshall, an entrepreneur “must be a natural leader of men who can choose assistants wisely but also exercise general control over everything and preserve order and unity in the main plan of business.” He must be constantly on the lookout for innovative methods that are guaranteed to be the most cost-effective currently in use. He must possess the inherent quality of leading the company and the workforce, towards a better socioeconomic scenario in a broader perspective.
Entrepreneur as Restorer or Perceptor.
John Bates Clark sees entrepreneurship as the responsible process of maintaining coordination that helps restore the socioeconomy to the position of effective equilibrium. Through a comprehensive “discovery process,” entrepreneurs identify lucrative new opportunities and risks, leading the market toward equilibrium. The role of entrepreneurship lies in being alert to profitable business opportunities, and for this, the quality of perception is a primary trait of a successful entrepreneur.