Abstract
The main objective of this chapter focuses on the relationship between entrepreneurship, innovation, and its effects on business sustainability. The authors reflect on the personality traits that are essential for an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is a mindset focused on identifying opportunities of economic value and translates into the pursuit of business opportunities through innovation. This perspective underlines the need to develop an individual for the globalized world; this development is the strategic key for economic and social development. The objective of this study is to explore how social capital, which is established between the entrepreneur and other economic role players, both inside and outside the organization, is a determinant for developing the entrepreneurial capacity. However, this depends on the organizational culture to focus on innovation. In this context, entrepreneurship is regarded as “entrepreneurial capital” affording the organization to enhance those skills needed to accomplish organizational sustainability.
TopFrom Innovation To Entrepreneurship
This subheading will debate the constructs of innovation and its relationship to learning.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Entrepreneurial Activity: Is nurtured with skills other than those acquired in the formal education system.
Capabilities: Dynamic capabilities are considered to be the key for organizations to maintain their competitive advantage. Organizational capabilities are dependent on collaborative learning.
Learning: Learning processes are evidenced as the main access of innovation. It is through learning that knowledge can be diffused and created. Without learning, the capacity to absorb knowledge is low and translates into the loss of business efficiency. Informal learning, along with formal learning, is a window of the national innovation system for productivity. It is a strategic investment in the organization’s knowledge pool.
Skills: Entrepreneurship and productivity are also influenced by the qualifications obtained through formal education, although this level of education only contributes with some technical skills. With higher-order inputs, within which are technical skills, emotional competencies, relational skills, social skills and spiritual competencies. This set of skills is also housed in the individual’s inner being.
Social Capital: Social capital is determinant in evolving the entrepreneurial capacity. The social capital construct emphasizes the significance of networks of robust, converging personal relationships matured over time that afford the basis for trust, cooperation, and collective action in social communities. Social capital is the accumulation of resources that are due to an individual or a group as a result of retaining a durable network of institutionalized interactions of mutual affiliation and appreciation. Social capital is also considered as a set of responsibilities, opportunities, and mutually developed norms and sanctions that develop from previous social collaborations. Social capital entails the access to and use of resources embedded in social networks that can be organized through intentional endeavor. There are various sources of social capital, especially for entrepreneurs, such as intentional connections, affinity, and community ties.
Entrepreneurial Capital: Entrepreneurial capital is focused on sustaining competitive advantage which is achieved with greater enthusiasm when human and relational capitals are transformed into structural capital. This is relevant because organizational capital is greater than the sum of simple capital, given the synergy created by collaboration and interaction between people and their environment. Entrepreneurial capital supports the organization to nurture those skills needed to accomplish organizational sustainability. Entrepreneurship is an “entrepreneurial capital” of the organization that is not limited to skills needed for work.