Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is the ability and urge to find new, creative solutions to problems. Entrepreneurs forsake the security of regular EMPLOYMENT in pursuit of their dreams. Their compensation is measured by their initiative, skill, and performance. An academic definition states that entrepreneurs are individuals willing to risk investing time and money in a business activity that has the potential to make a PROFIT or incur a loss. Entrepreneurs are innovators who make things happen. The potential for success often blinds an entrepreneur to obstacles, creating a single-mindedness hard to ignore and nearly impossible to stop. CAPITALISM provides endless opportunity to achieve business success and accumulate WEALTH. People who are excited about profitable opportunities and vigorously pursue them are a business force of unquenchable desire and inexhaustible energy. Economic textbooks typically categorize resources as human, natural, and capital. Some texts use the land, labor, CAPITAL, and entrepreneurship categories. Entrepreneurship is a resource. In the 1990s, as they discarded socialist economic systems, many Central European countries recognized the need to develop entrepreneurial resources. Often the first entrepreneurs were the people who previously had been operating in the black market. In the United States, people like Bill Gates, Mary Kay, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Case fit the definition of entrepreneur. Their dreams involved risking time and money on an idea with no guarantees. Destiny, freedom, and money motivated them. Today Microsoft, Mary Kay Cosmetics, Amazon. com, and AOL are household names. Entrepreneurs are not held to the restrictions of corporate rules and regulations; they decide how to manage their personal lives and businesses. Many people crave the freedom from direct supervision, and this is very important to entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs answer to consumers and the requirements of their individual business; their supervisor is the person who stares back at them from the mirror. Even though money is important, it is hardly ever at the top of the list of entrepreneurial motivation. Entrepreneurs simply want to be rewarded in direct proportion to their own efforts. Most realize that profitability is usually not immediate but can be the end result of hard work, a good idea, and perseverance. What exactly is an entrepreneur? Marketing professor Dr. Jerry Moorman has a unique definition: “An entrepreneur is simply a capitalist in heat!” Ignoring the crudeness of this analogy, it is probably an accurate description.