Creating more business and jobs through fast-growing, innovative firms is one of the key objectives of the developing world today. It is necessary to support innovation in existing companies and help create new business opportunities to attain such goals. Entrepreneurial activities need to be promoted through enhancing business skills to create fresh opportunities.
Developing countries are required to speed up entrepreneurship development to increase gross domestic product (GDP) and at the same time, grab a higher global market share. An entrepreneur can take full advantage of latent resources - human, technological and financial, information and knowledge - and a time-bound programme may be chalked out to overcome the old outlook of many.
Any successful entrepreneur is a person who has effective control of commercial undertaking and one who undertakes a business or an enterprise in the true sense of the term. That entrepreneur is an innovative person who maximises his profits by following new strategies or venturing into new products or services.
Some basics need to be remembered:
n Entrepreneurship is about discovery and pursuit of opportunities, without regard to resources currently controlled, that result in value creation;
n In some cases, it is connected to creation of an organisation or venture or enterprise;
n Not every small business startup represents entrepreneurship;
n Entrepreneurship does not require a profit motive, but always value creation.
A successful entrepreneur requires specific characteristics including skills and hard working attitude and s/he is a risk taker as every business involves risk.
Entrepreneurs must know how things work and show flexibility of mind in order to adapt to changing trends, markets, technologies, rules, and economic environments. They face bureaucracy, make mistakes, receive criticism, and deal with money, family, or stress problems, but still stick to their dreams of seeing the venture succeed.
Effective transmission and sharing of knowledge, information and skills for joint exploration will be crucial to ensure better delivery and open further growth opportunities that economies like India and Bangladesh, are looking for. If academicians and present and future entrepreneurs go on working in isolation, it would be less effective in delivering the results required to compete in the global market.
Businesses will be able to take advantage of a workforce that has skills tailored to needs. Learners will benefit from an education that will make them more attractive to future employers and more apt at contributing to development of those employers' businesses.
This, in turn, will help entrepreneurs to translate their ideas into successful businesses; getting support for technology, market assessment, access to human resources, mentoring and finance. The process will help develop a clear strategy to penetrate into overseas markets, breaking existing barriers and overcoming the entrepreneurs' fear in moving abroad.
So, the upshot is: explore excellence in business, education, entrepreneurship and research for world class innovation. A partnership of businesses, entrepreneurs, universities, research institutes and technology centres will produce new innovation models and inspire others to emulate them.
Successful entrepreneurs recognise that change is a catalyst for innovation. So, it is essential to develop an entrepreneurial mindset needed to energise existing/new companies, to assess market opportunities, as well as to develop pragmatic leadership skills to launch and nurture new business ventures within a larger organisation.
Dr BK Mukhopadhyay is a management economist and commentator on ongoing business and economic affairs.