what is entrepreneurship?

Answer 1

In practice, entrepreneurship can be:
* starting your own business
* inventing something new
* a spirit of creative thinking and innovation that embraces an entire organization.
* Entrepreneurs take many paths to many business objectives.

Take a look at this list of entrepreneurship definitions. Note that innovation is part of most of these definitions. Some mention starting a business, but entrepreneurship can be simply a way of thinking and taking action.

Definitions of Entrepreneurship
"An entrepreneur is a person who is willing to take risks in order to obtain positive results." (Cornell student, 2001)
"An entrepreneur is one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise." (Cornell student, 2001)
"Entrepreneurship is being a dare devil businessperson by assuming risks, thinking differently, and distributing resources so as to shake up the market." (Cornell student, 2001)
"An entrepreneur is a person who has the vision and the drive to overtake and make a project happen." (Cornell student, 2001)
The role of entrepreneurship is "to assemble and deploy resources in new combinations that disrupt the otherwise static nature of the market." Schumpeter (1934)
"Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource." (Drucker, 1985).
"Perceived opportunities are contrived from the entrepreneur’s assessment of the ‘waste’ in existing resource combinations." Kirzner (1973)
"Entrepreneurship is the process of acquiring, assembling, and deploying resources in the pursuit of perceived opportunities for long-term gain." Bowman & Upton, 1991)
"Entrepreneurship is the discovery of new combinations of resources under uncertain situations that generate entrepreneurial rent as reward for risk taking." (Rumelt, 1987)
"A firm-creating entrepreneur creates and perhaps operates a new business firm, while an innovating entrepreneur transforms inventions and ideas into economically viable entities." (Baumol, 1991)

Entrepreneurship describes a specific approach to business development and ownership, and it can also be a way of thinking that focuses on innovation-an innovative product or service, an innovative production process, innovative marketing strategies, or an overall approach to business.

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Answer 2

Question 1: Think of an occasion when you faced a miscommunication problem. What do you think caused the problem? How do you think it should have been handled better?
Communication is very essential in our day to day activities. It gives us an opportunity to convey important information to people. However at times miscommunication may arise. This can be due to poor listening skills, ignorance ,making general assumptions ,being unclear and wrong use of body language. This can cause a derail in passing information hence causing disagreements. For instance I recall an incident when I faced such a scenario in my work place. I was doing a part time job in one of the biggest companies and most of the clients in my department were literate. However one day I was sent out for a field work analysis. In my case I used questionnaires to analyze data. When I went back to collect the questionnaires I realized that most people had not filled the questionnaires (Bateman, 123) .I came to understand that some never understood the language that I had used and others never listened to what I said hence they were unable to complete the questionnaires.Time was not on my side and my instructor needed the filled questionnaires. I realized that I had made a great mistake because I never listened carefully to the instructions my instructor had given me. I had used the wrong language. Similarly the few people who filled the questionnaires never listened to the instructions. This actually caused miscommunication. This delayed my course work.
I realized from that incident that listening skills are very essential in any communication process. Lack of adherence to the skills leads to miscommunication. I also noted that instructions are very crucial in conveying important information. Language is also another significant aspect in communication. Use of the wrong language distorts the message because the intended receiver cannot perceive the meaning of the message.
Question 8: Discuss organizational rumors you have heard: what they were about, how they got started, how accurate they were, and how people reacted to them. What lessons can you learn from these episodes?
The spread of rumors in many organizations has been a great threat to the performance of most organizations today. Rumors can be defined as information which people hear but they are not sure of it. Being uncertain about an issue make people spread rumors to the employees. If not dealt with properly the issue of rumors may lead to organizational change. Poor communication is the major cause of rumors in most organizations. However some rumors especially business rumors can be accurate. For instance, in an organization which had specialized in marketing and selling beauty products, there was a rumor that the management team had decided to lower the prices of most of the products. The employees heard of the rumor. Consequently they increased the price of the beauty products to their clients without the knowledge of the management team. The employees did so because they feared getting abnormal losses (Bateman 320). With time their competitors drastically decreased the prices of their products. Therefore the demand of the company’s products lowered. The management team realized that the sales volume of their products had gone down. In interviewing the employees they came to know that a rumor had spread within them that the prices of the products will be lowered by the management. Though this rumor was accurate the management team had failed because it never communicated the time it lower the price of the product.
Another instance of the rumor is when employees of a certain sugar company spread rumors that the sugar company had been relocated. However that was not true because the company had just plans to relocate but it had not done so. People with sugarcane plantations around that place nearly sold their sugarcanes. Therefore the company suffered most because it had to incur expenses in getting raw materials from far places. Despite that the rumor was accurate it was not communicated to the employees to be sure of the time the company was to relocate.
From the episodes I learnt many lessons. One is that communication is of great importance in any organization. Managers should inform employees in what they do.

Answer 3

In my adventure as a black entrepreneur, I observed maximum persons of my kinfolk take the government pastime path, whilst I continuously had the itch to pursue a self-made profession. i became privileged to attend MIT, a college that fosters a manner of existence of countless entrepreneurial endeavors from a type of categories. training and accelerators hosted by way of the college gave me the backside expertise to run a company and amazing pursue a undertaking. It became an outstanding studying possibility and had a significant consequence on assisting me launch the startup I run now. besides the undeniable fact that, I continuously discovered that i became a minority in the entrepreneurial circles i became an component of. I’ve discovered that accelerators are exceedingly substantial in offering a extra huge coaching, exceedingly while run by way of experienced marketers. the international Founders’ skills Accelerator (GFSA) application director is bill Aulet, famed educator, author and entrepreneur; the HAX accelerator is controlled by way of Duncan Turner, entrepreneur and previous IDEO fashion designer. besides the undeniable fact that, in the two cohorts, there have been very few minorities. In GFSA, there have been 4 blacks out of roughly 50 founders; in HAX there weren’t any represented between the 15 agencies. This exceeded off inspite of the international variety efforts that have been put in place by way of the two agencies for conventional minority and state-specific populations.

Answer 4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneurship