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Who is entrepreneur, exactly?

Posted by Ganga on 03 July 2008

It's too basic. I agree. But not that trivial as it seems. You'd agree soon :)

Etymologically the word "entrepreneur" means - "one who undertakes or manages". It can't get vaguer than this. So we ask to online dictionaries. They give us back many definitions; a most common one is - "a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture". Well, as per this definition, every firm founder will be an entrepreneur - which feels intuitively incorrect. So now lets see if we get something more specific from our seeker friend called Google. Alright! it brings back more than ~500,000 results so lets agree - it's not that trivial a question as it may seem! :)

In short, different people perceive entrepreneurship differently; some of the most common notions are -

* starting a business
* taking risk
* follow intuitions
* creative thinking
* or some fancy combination of words like passion, market, dedication, venture, intelligence etc - sometimes to an extent where entrepreneurship seems like an all-comprehensive and the only ambitious act remained for mankind :-)

In fact, all these notions fail to distinguish an entrepreneur from others. For example, there are many who start businesses, then are they all entrepreneurs? How to differentiate between someone who started a small bookstore to make his living from a person who built amazon.com, ebay.com when there was no proven market for online bookshop? There is something that is "unique" about entrepreneurs - that distinguishes them from rest of the world. And that's nothing but a strong desire to innovate a business!

An entrepreneur is driven by a desire to make a difference - a strong (and may be naive) ambition to change the world. They will start businesses, take risks, follow intuitions and channelize their creative thinking - but will settle only over a business that satisfies their thirst of innovation - something new and different. That's what makes them pioneers. They look for "not-yet-known" ways to build a business using either completely new resources or existing resources in an untrodden way. They usually create markets for products where none existed before.

To put it simply, inventor to technology - is - entrepreneur to business.

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