Entrepreneurship
Channel: Viki English
Date: 26/10/2017

Entrepreneurship is the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which is more often than not, initially a small business, offering a product, process or service for sale or hire. The people who create these businesses are called entrepreneurs.[1][need quotation to verify][2] Entrepreneurship has been described as the "capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit".[3] While definitions of entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the high risks involved in launching a start-up, a significant proportion of businesses have to close, due to "lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis – or a combination of all of these"[4] or due to lack of market demand. In the 2000s, the definition of "entrepreneurship" expanded to explain how and why some individuals (or teams) identify opportunities, evaluate them as viable and then decide to exploit them, whereas others do not[5] and, in turn, how entrepreneurs use these opportunities to develop new products or services, launch new firms or even new industries and create wealth.[6] Recent[when?] advances stress the fundamentally uncertain nature of the entrepreneurial process, because although opportunities exist their existence cannot be discovered or identified prior to their actualization into profits.[7] What appears as a real opportunity ex ante might actually be a non-opportunity or one that cannot be actualized by entrepreneurs lacking the necessary business skills, financial or social capital.

An entrepreneur has been defined[by whom?] as, "a person who starts, organizes and manages any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk; running a small business with all the risk and reward of any given business process".[8][9] Entrepreneurs tend to be good at perceiving new business opportunities and they often exhibit positive biases in their perception (i.e., a bias towards finding new possibilities and seeing unmet market needs) and a pro-risk-taking attitude that makes them more likely to exploit the opportunity.[10][11] An entrepreneur may be in control of a commercial undertaking, directing the factors of production – the human, financial and material resources – that are required to exploit a business opportunity. Entrepreneurs act as managers and oversee the launch and growth of an enterprise. Entrepreneurship is the process by which either an individual or a team identifies a business opportunity and acquires and deploys the necessary resources required for its exploitation. The exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities may include:[12]

developing a business plan
hiring the human resources
acquiring financial and material resources
providing leadership
being responsible for both the venture's success or failure
risk aversion
Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) saw the role of the entrepreneur in the economy as "creative destruction" – launching innovations that simultaneously destroy old industries while ushering in new industries and approaches. For Schumpeter, the changes and "dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating entrepreneur [were] the norm of a healthy economy".[13]

While Entrepreneurial spirit may be characterized as being "by innovation and risk-taking",[3] entrepreneurship is often associated with new, small, for-profit start-ups, entrepreneurial behavior can be seen in small-, medium- and large-sized firms, new and established firms and in for-profit and not-for-profit organizations, including voluntary-sector groups, charitable organizations and government.[14]

Entrepreneurship may operate within an entrepreneurship ecosystem which often includes:

government programs and services that promote entrepreneurship and support entrepreneurs and start-ups
non-governmental organizations such as small-business associations and organizations that offer advice and mentoring to entrepreneurs (e.g., through entrepreneurship centers or websites)
small-business advocacy organizations that lobby governments for increased support for entrepreneurship programs and more small business-friendly laws and regulations
entrepreneurship resources and facilities (e.g., business incubators and seed accelerators)
entrepreneurship education and training programs offered by schools, colleges and universities
financing (e.g., bank loans, venture capital financing, angel investing and government and private foundation grants)