Key Characteristics of Entrepreneurs and Innovators
Experts are of the view that entrepreneurs are the individuals who recognise the business opportunities and establish their business ventures from this identification of business opportunities (Schaper 2016). Successful entrepreneurs add up in creating wealth in the society with the help of their entrepreneurial ventures. The entrepreneurship firms also generate employment in the nation and turn helps in creating a prosperous society. As opined by Teece (2014), Entrepreneurial action can be termed as a theory of continuous operation and evolution of innovation. This statement can be supported by tending to state that an entrepreneur has to continuously thrive not only for earning the internal goals and objectives of the business firm but also have to acquire some essential entrepreneurial traits that help the individual in making their business success (Frese and Gielnik 2014).
Perhaps to be considered as one of the essential characteristics, being passionate is crucial for every entrepreneur to turn the business into a successful and renowned one. In this connection, I indulge the nature of being passionate about whatever I do. I have a mindset of learning and implementing things that would help me achieve my dreams I am passionate about. This statement can be proved by setting an example of Bill Gates, a known entrepreneur of America who introduced Microsoft Corporation (Barringer 2015). He was passionate about setting his dreams into his interest in computer systems. He was not forced to work for his passion, instead created an opportunity for himself and his passion.
A business firm may take risky twists and turns at any moment. This requires the need to change in the business process at any point in time. Keeping this in view, the essential trait an entrepreneur should exhibit is the trait of flexibility. Not only at the times of uncertain risk but also during good times rolling in the business, an entrepreneur should be flexible. According to my personality traits, I inherit the quality of being flexible. I can easily adjust myself as per the situations and take flexibly work according to the requirements. This statement can be verified by taking the example of Sir Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group, who because of the flexible nature was a successful young entrepreneur (Read et al. 2016). He was flexible enough to diversify in many other sectors of business which made him be recognised a man of a net worth of 5.1 billion in the Forbes magazine.
Identifying Personal Strengths and Limitations
Every single entrepreneur should have parameters set for themselves and should be motivated to work hard first on their own than to command. In this connection, I manifest the motivational trait within me. According to my personality trait, I do not need to be forced to perform any task. I indulge in performing with my wish and will. Let’s take an example of Mark Cuban, an American businessperson who owned the National Basketball Association (Leeds, Von Allmen and Matheson 2018). He always believed in himself and his ideas of working with the motivation of just working with his best. He never thought of winning or losing because he believed that the fear of failing would hamper his work. Rather than thinking about the result he always was motivated to work with complete positivity.
A successful entrepreneur has to be someone who owns special skills of creativity. The entrepreneur should frequently focus on innovating new and creative ideas about the company. In this connection, I feel myself to be excluding this field of creativity since I lack a high power of imagination. This lack of imagination may lead to the failure of generating an idea about my start-up of a business firm. This may cause to my inability to innovating a successful business. This can be strongly proved by taking an example of Walter Elias Disney, the owner of the famous Walt Disney Company, which was claimed to be a failed production company because of its lack in creativity (Hon and Lui 2016).
A business entrepreneur should always inherit the ability of a risk-taker. Entrepreneurial risk is termed to be a complex risk, and in this term, the entrepreneur should be active and able enough to make necessary changes in the strategic plan made before-hand if certain risks pop up into the working environment. In this connection, I examine myself as a non-significant risk handler. This inhibiting trait of not being able to put up with risks occurring into business may result in the closure of my future business firm. Let’s take an example of Mike Lazaridis, an entrepreneur of Canada who was also successful in creating a revolutionary business of wireless communication but somehow in the later of the firm failed to take necessary changes required in the business accordingly with the difference in the market conditions and entrance of similar mobile companies (Kakkar, Shah and Kakkar 2016). This resulted in the failure of his vast business of Blackberry smartphones.
Importance of Self-Management and Innovation
Every business entrepreneur should be their decision-maker. The process of taking decisions is considered to be a critical process in any business organisation. As the owner of the company, the business individual is liable to make every single decision of the company. The decision making process creates both a significant and influential impact of the firm. In this connection, I as an individual lose this trait of taking appropriate decisions. I am an indecisive person. This lack of making decisions makes me feel that this wills adversely affect my future business procedure as I would lack in taking prior arrangements to build my business a successful one. Let’s take an example of George Hollingberry, the owner of Comet Battery Stores, which turned out to be a complete failure because of the lack of decision making according to the market structure (Wander and Forstner 2013).
Hence, I believe that only having an idea of starting a business will not help an individual turn into a successful entrepreneur. An individual needs to obtain both the qualities of an innovator and entrepreneur to run a business successfully (Drucker 2014). In this connection, I feel that the importance of learning the art of self-management and development. An individual is solely responsible for discovering these necessary factors to become a successful entrepreneur and innovator (Komppula 2014). Analysing this study made me examine the factors I lack behind in the potential of becoming an entrepreneur. The study also made me understand the importance of innovation into business. Establishment of a business firm is not the only ideology to a successful entrepreneur. An entrepreneur needs to take up with the challenges of changing technology and frequently innovate business products and services. Thereby, I believe learning the art of Self-development would lead me to become innovative and creative, and Self-management will teach me how to manage risks and take prior decisions for my future firm. Innovation process needs both knowledge and expertise to efficiently make changes in the pre-processes of the business (Massa and Tucci 2013). Innovation in the industry is necessary because it enhances the standards of living of both the organisation and society as it needs new technologies to be enrolled to innovate the products and services. Innovation provides with three important values, considered as- Social, Economic and Monetary value. The social value connects to humanity, the economic value enriches the nation, and the monetary value benefits the goals and the primary objective of the innovating firm.
During the reflection of the entrepreneurial traits, I concluded that there are few aspects of entrepreneurship that I inherit in myself whereas, I lack in some which need to be amended in the context that I desire to be a future entrepreneur and innovator. The positive aspects of my characteristics that I examined were that I am passionate, motivated and exhibit flexibility, which would enhance my personality and help me perform well in my future business firm. Whereas, I also examined that I lack behind in creativity, taking decisions and risks. I learned that these negative aspects would affect my desire to be an entrepreneur and innovator. In this connection, I decided to enrol myself in entrepreneurship-related courses that would help me in the process of learning self-development and managing myself for the same. Since I inherit the nature of being flexible and that I am always motivated, I understand that learning will help me overcome my fears and negative aspects of becoming an entrepreneur and innovator. I felt that learning the art of Self-development and management will enhance my skills of taking decisions on my own and grow creative enough to generate new ideas and innovations with the upcoming changes in the technologies. This, in turn, would help me succeed in my future business idea. As opined by Bason (2018), innovation is the crucial ideology to gain success in the business as it helps improve the product and services a business entrepreneur is dealing in. In this context, I believe that enhancing myself in the field of the self-managing process will be of great help for my wish to become a future renowned entrepreneur and innovator.
References
Barringer, B.R., 2015. Entrepreneurship: Successfully launching new ventures. Pearson Education India.
Bason, C., 2018. Leading public sector innovation: Co-creating for a better society. Policy Press.
Drucker, P., 2014. Innovation and entrepreneurship. Routledge.
Frese, M. and Gielnik, M.M., 2014. The psychology of entrepreneurship. Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav., 1(1), pp.413-438.
Hon, A.H. and Lui, S.S., 2016. Employee creativity and innovation in organisations: Review, integration, and future directions for hospitality research. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, 28(5), pp.862-885.
Kakkar, K., Shah, R. and Kakkar, M., 2013. Risk analysis in mobile application development.
Komppula, R., 2014. The role of individual entrepreneurs in the development of competitiveness for a rural tourism destination–A case study. Tourism Management, 40, pp.361-371.
Leeds, M.A., Von Allmen, P. and Matheson, V.A., 2018. The economics of sports. Routledge.
Massa, L. and Tucci, C.L., 2013. Business model innovation. The Oxford Handbook of Innovation Management, Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp.420-441.
Read, S., Sarasvathy, S., Dew, N. and Wiltbank, R., 2016. Effectual entrepreneurship. Routledge.
Schaper, M., 2016. Understanding the green entrepreneur. In Making Ecopreneurs (pp. 27-40). Routledge.
Teece, D.J., 2014. The foundations of enterprise performance: Dynamic and ordinary capabilities in an (economic) theory of firms. Academy of management perspectives, 28(4), pp.328-352.
Wander, A. and Förstner, R., 2013, October. Innovative fault detection, isolation and recovery onboard spacecraft: Study and implementation using cognitive automation. In 2013 Conference on Control and Fault-Tolerant Systems (SysTol)(pp. 336-341). IEEE.
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