Characteristics of Successful Entrepeneurs - Essay Example

Significance of the Research When it comes to business, what makes one successful entrepreneurship is undoubtedly one of the most significant topics because successful entrepreneur finds business opportunity, seizes it and creates a market of his own by beating the competitors and achieving sustainable competitive advantage. Studying and exploring in to the essential characteristics of an entrepreneur would be helpful to understand what makes an entrepreneur and how he brings success to enterprises.

As Volery, Doss and Mazzarol (p. 1) noted, entrepreneurship remains to be a driving force in the modern economy more than ever. It’s because, entrepreneurs meet the economic needs through the creation of thousands of business every years. Many businesses in recent days started ‘downsizing’ or ‘outsourcing’ processes, but entrepreneurs are those who create new ventures and new jobs that help strengthen the economy as a whole. Entrepreneur has played pivotal roles in today’s business developments, technological advances and all the radical changes that brought renaissance in business environments.

People all over the world are able to meet their varying requirements and specific individual needs only because entrepreneurs in different parts of the world, no matter how smaller or larger they are, have found opportunities, thought creatively, innovated and established an enterprise to provide something valuable to the people. Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs Many researchers have obviously agreed with the very fundamental view of entrepreneurship as described by the father of entrepreneurship, Joseph A Schumpeter.

According to him, entrepreneurship is innovation (Carsrud and Brannback , p. 7). Entrepreneur is one who perceives or finds an opportunity to be seized and then to create a new product or service or changes an existing one in order to create new marketable contribution to the economy (McDaniel, p. 57). An entrepreneur is not only an opportunity finder, but be a good manager with basic managerial skills like direction, coordination, supervision, decision making, risk bearing, control and problem solving etc (Brockhaus, p. 1). An entrepreneur doesn’t need to be a manager or not to function as a manager, but he must be skilled in managerial qualities and functional areas like those mentioned above.

A basic difference that most literatures have described is that a manager is not always the owner of the enterprise and therefore he is relatively less responsible where as the entrepreneur is the owner of the business and more responsible too. The most essential and basic characteristics of entrepreneur are detailed below: Entrepreneur as an Innovator Innovation is one of the fundamental qualities of an entrepreneur. As Drucker (p. 17) noted, innovation is very specific tool that an entrepreneur is essentially required to have and with this he can find chances and make them opportunities for various business purposes.

Finding opportunities for some thing new and bringing a vision in to reality through innovation is thus critical element to the success of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur needs to be innovator for major innovations, start up of business, developing new products or services for a presently