Management Consultancy

?  A simple question…someone who sets up and runs a business.  Not so simple, there are at least 3 schools of thought on how to define an entrepreneur.  One suggests that they are defined by traits they are born with but the evidence isn’t very supportive.  One suggests that they are defined by the actions and activities they do…but these are the same for high-performance individuals whether they are self employed or employed.  The third school is the one we sign up to, entrepreneurs are defined by their ability to identify, assess and execute a business idea.  Shout out to Shane and Venkataraman (2000) who started this line of thought.  So, if you put a new technology or innovation in front of 5 entrepreneurs, they will all see the opportunity differently.  They will see how it will it can be utilised differently.  Different uses, for different clients in different industries.  Entrepreneurship is therefore very personal.  It is how you identify, assess and execute your business idea that counts.

This is easier to define as the enterprise the formal legal and organisational structure of the business.  It is the sum of the legal structure, people, assets, IP and culture.  It is the organisation.

Entrepreneurship is the process of engaging in enterprising activity.  Entrepreneurship is the process of constantly identifying opportunities, assessing their viability and then implementing the business idea and executing the business plan successfully.  Being a process, it can be utilised in a number of settings and this is why we have different types of entrepreneurs, such as…

A nascent entrepreneur is someone who has the ‘entrepreneur’ bug but is not setting up or running a business.  The surveys tell us that only around 10% of the adult population have an inclination to being self-employed or entrepreneurial.  Thus, at any one time there are a lot of people who are interested in entrepreneurship but are not active, they may be studying, working too hard, raising children, caring for family members etc.  However, these are the pool from which we draw the next generation of entrepreneurs and thus they are very important.

This is the mainstream understanding of an entrepreneur; someone setting up and running a business.

A serial entrepreneur is someone who sets up a series of enterprises or businesses.  They tend to set up businesses one after the other.  Say someone sets up a business and then sells that business when successful and then takes the money and sets up another new business from scratch…that’s a serial entrepreneur.

This is an entrepreneur who starts or invests in a portfolio of businesses at the same time.  They tend to be strategic and leave day-to-day management of the businesses to business managers and they oversee the set of enterprises.

This is someone who identified opportunities, assesses their viability and then executes the business plan but within a larger corporate organisation.  Larger corporations actually find it hard to naturally innovate internally and many buy up smaller innovative companies and then mainstream these into the larger corporates reach.  However, some are trying to encourage internal innovation and entrepreneurial activity within the corporate entity.  Those engaging in these activities are defined as Intrapreneurs.

This is someone who identifies a specific social or community-based need, identifies a solution to this social problem, brings other people and resources together to address the solution, sets up an organisation of some type to implement the solution and then manages this organisation to implement the solution and address the social issue.  It is the identify, assess and implement process, thus entrepreneurship, but done to address a social need rather than a commercial or profit-driven need.  We will deal with social enterprise and social innovation in a different ‘Guide to’.