Entrepreneur is a person of telescopic faculty drive and talent who perceives business opportunities and promptly seizes them for exploitation. Entrepreneur needs to possess competencies to perform entrepreneur activities. Table 1 gives core competencies.
1. Economic and dynamic activity:
Entrepreneurship is an economic activity because it involves the creation and operation of an enterprise with a view to creating value or wealth by ensuring optimum utilisation of scarce resources. Since this value creation activity is performed continuously in the midst of uncertain business environment, therefore, entrepreneurship is regarded as a dynamic force.
2. Related to innovation:
Entrepreneurship involves a continuous search for new ideas. Entrepreneurship compels an individual to continuously evaluate the existing modes of business operations so that more efficient and effective systems can be evolved and adopted. In other words, entrepreneurship is a continuous effort for synergy (optimization of performance) in organizations.
3. Profit potential:
“Profit potential is the likely level of return or compensation to the entrepreneur for taking on the risk of developing an idea into an actual business venture.” Without profit potential, the efforts of entrepreneurs would remain only an abstract and a theoretical leisure activity.
4. Risk bearing:
The essence of entrepreneurship is the ‘willingness to assume risk’ arising out of the creation and implementation of new ideas. New ideas are always tentative and their results may not be instantaneous and positive.
An entrepreneur has to have patience to see his efforts bear fruit. In the intervening period (time gap between the conception and implementation of an idea and its results), an entrepreneur has to assume risk. If an entrepreneur does not have the willingness to assume risk, entrepreneurship would never succeed.
