ENTERPRISE & SMALL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

ENTERPRISE & SMALL BUSINESS MANAGEMENT - Essay Example The external factors include culture, role models, work experience, education, and environment. It is important to look at all of these factors and their influence on entrepreneurial behaviour. The relationship between the entrepreneur, personality characteristics, values, and other dimensions helps explain why some become entrepreneurs and others do not. Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, as many new ventures fail. In the context of the creation of for-profit enterprises, entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service in order to obtain certain profit. While there is social entrepreneurship in most markets, business entrepreneurs often have strong beliefs about a market opportunity and are willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue that opportunity. Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either "political entrepreneurs" or "market entrepreneurs." There is also the concept of social entrepreneurship. Since the beginning of the history, people have been interested in studying the nature of entrepreneurship. They wanted to find the 'traits' that distinguished entrepreneurs from non-entrepreneurs and successful entrepreneurs from unsuccessful entrepreneurs. Some researchers believed that cognitive and psychological factors like intelligence, ambition and aggressiveness are the traits commonly found in entrepreneurs. However, there were also another set of researchers who believed that physical characteristics like height (especially more than average), large body structure and personal attractiveness are important traits of entrepreneurs. Most research studies on entrepreneurship suggest that there are certain factors that differentiate entrepreneurs from non - entrepreneurs. Some of these include initiative, desire to lead, integrity, self-confidence, analytical ability, and knowledge of the specific company, industry or technology. If in case the above mentioned factors are supplemented with traits such as charisma, creativity and flexibility, an individual is likely to be an effective leader. The presence of these characteristics in an individual does not guarantee that he will be an effective l