What an entrepreneur wants?
Posted on April 25, 2008 | Categorized under Entrepreneurship
So, by now, we kind of agree over the fundamental entrepreneurial motivation; it’s nothing but a non-ceasing desire to innovate a business. Also as already discussed, there can be some other desires that can possibly spur a person to pursue innovative business - those include Freedom/Independence, Money, Fame, Philanthropy, and Power/Influence. Now, especially after looking at these comments, we ought to accept that these other desires are not all that insignificant. They can’t create entrepreneurs, per se; but carry another (may I call subtle?) significance — they decide how the entrepreneurship is pursued. Confused? Well, that was indeed the intention. Lets see if we could make it further comprehensible!
An entrepreneur is a person who’s essentially driven by a desire to change the way business is done - and so he’s always in search of not just any but only the opportunities those are innovative in his perception. Agree. But the story doesn’t end there! And that’s where the other desires come into play. These desires usually have a role in deciding - which of the possible innovative opportunities gets identified and further how the identified opportunity gets seized. In other words, there will always be opportunities those are not perceived as innovative by an entrepreneur but can possibly fulfill other desires (if exploited). Those are unlikely to be pursued by him. Whereas, again, there will be more than one innovative opportunities lying around at any point of time; and which one gets identified and how that one gets seized depends largely on his other desires.
For example -
- a freedom and independence driven entrepreneur will prefer to self-finance his venture instead of seeking angel investors or venture capital funding.
- a money and/or fame driven entrepreneur will focus on building a large, global (and a for-profit) company.
- a philanthropist entrepreneur will build a for-purpose (and mostly non-profit) organization.
On another note, its quite possible that a pure wantrapreneur (want to be an entrepreneur), who does not have any strong motivation to be a business pioneer as such, but accidentally goes for an innovative business — to solely fulfill his other desires. In this scenario, given that there exist other easier and direct options, he has actually opted for a non-optimal choice. As failures are inevitable in any business venture, this wantrapreneur will face a few failures too. Failures do have a tremendous propensity to make oneself introspective and retrospective. At that point this wantrapreneur will be forced to evaluate other options and most likely will opt for another more optimal and non-entrepreneurial option.
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