Entrepreneurship as the Vantage Point

Introduction

Entrepreneurship is the dynamic process of creating incremental wealth. This wealth is created by individuals who assume the major risks in terms of equity, time, and/or career commitment of providing value for some product or service. The product or service itself may or may not be new or exceptional but value must somehow be infused by an entrepreneur (Shapero, 1975). Entrepreneurship is an elusive concept and has been defined differently by different authors. Some of them view it as ‘risk-bearing’; others call it as ‘innovations’, and yet others consider it as ‘thrill seeking’. Today, an entrepreneur is an innovator or developer who recognizes and seizes opportunities; converts those opportunities into workable/marketable ideas; adds value through time, effort, money, or skills; assumes the risks of the competitive marketplace to implement these ideas; and realizes the rewards from these' efforts.

Figure 1.

Concept of entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur is the aggressive catalyst for change in the world of business. He or she is an independent thinker who dares to be different in a background of common events. The characteristics are; personal initiative, the ability to consolidate resources, management skills, a desire for autonomy, and risk taking. Other characteristics include aggressiveness, competitiveness, goal-oriented behaviour, confidence, opportunistic behaviour, intuitiveness, reality-based actions, the ability to learn from mistakes, and the ability to employ human relations skills. Entrepreneurship is an essential element for economic progress as it manifests technology in different ways: a) by identifying, assessing and exploiting business opportunities; b) by creating new firms and/or renewing existing ones by making them more dynamic; and c) by driving the economy forward - through innovation, competence, job creation- and by generally improving the wellbeing of society.

The accessibility of Information technology is a necessity for any entrepreneurial activity. Today technology has its impact on individuals and communities as entrepreneurship does, and hence IT cannot be neglected. In the past two decades, advanced industrial countries with new technology have become driving force of entrepreneurship creating economic development (Tavakoli, 2013). Given that entrepreneurship and impact of technology on it have evolved into a distinctive force, which is in line with changes in business optimization.