“What do you need to start a business? Three simple things: know your product better than anyone, know your customer, and have a burning desire to succeed.” – Dave Thomas, founder of Wendy’s
“Entrepreneur is a person who started a new business where there was none before.” – W.B. Gartner
Productivity is the father of creativity! Necessity is the mother of business opportunity.
“An entrepreneur sees opportunities and seizes them; he organises and focuses resources in exploiting them.” – thinkUP
Value-creation, innovation and sustainable development are the central issues in business, economic and environmental (BEE) prosperity respectively. Turning a creative business idea into a lucrative business opportunity or taking an idea from “indoors into industry” for business exploitation is what defines entrepreneurship of necessity (from business idea to business opportunity). The ultimate goal of entrepreneurial practices is not just to create value; it is to create a better world! Sustainable development goals aim at ensuring that economic activities are eco-friendly and value chain doesn’t become “problem chain.”
Ideas rule the world. The process of creating, developing and communicating ideas which are abstract, concrete, or visual is key for organisations in creating successful products, services, businesses and solutions. It also includes the process of constructing the idea, innovating the concept, developing the process, and bringing the concept to reality. The newness and genuineness of a creative idea are the hallmarks of innovation-driven entrepreneurship. The three pillars of IDE are creativity, necessity and sustainability.
In the social sciences, an innovation is something that is new, better, and has been adopted. An innovator, in a general sense, is a person or an organisation, who is one of the first to introduce into reality, something better than before. Creativity focuses on discovery/delivery. Necessity is about demand/desire while sustainability is everything about development. Demand and not discovery is the soul of business. Business is primarily about meeting people’s needs through product or service offering. Every business is unique. However, the following questions should be asked before an entrepreneur starts a new business or launches a new product: 1. What problem(s) does it solve? 2. What value does it offer? 3. What vacuum does it fill? 4. How does it differ from others?
Business necessity is essentially a function of the consumers’ needs/demand. Value-creation and innovation should therefore be geared towards customer yearnings and satisfaction. “Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is a measure of how well a company’s products, services, and overall customer experience meet customer expectations.” It reflects your business’ health by showing how well your products or services resonate with buyers. Demand is “WAR”! –Willingness, Ability and Readiness. Are customers willing, able and ready to pay for the product/service they deem necessary?
An entrepreneur is a social agent; he enriches the “happiness endowment.” An entrepreneur is an “economic reagent”; he enhances the business environment. Entrepreneurs are visionary leaders willing to take risk and exercise initiative, taking advantage of market opportunities by planning, organising and deploying resources, often by innovating to create new or improving existing products or services. The very core of entrepreneurship of necessity is turning realities into business opportunities. The value of creativity and necessity is in products/services. According to Steve Jobs, innovation is creativity plus technology. Innovation requires adequate funding for its spread through users, sellers and buyers (USB). Value chain exits because there is a creation of value. “A value chain refers to the full lifecycle of a product or process, including material sourcing, production, consumption and disposal/recycling processes.”
In the recent years, entrepreneurs have been involved in so many things hence an entrepreneur:
- is an innovator or developer who recognises and seizes opportunities,
- converts those opportunities into workable/market ideas,
- adds value through time, effort, money, or skills,
- assumes the risks of the competitive market place to implement these ideas, and
- realises the rewards from these efforts. Entrepreneurial actions include turning a business idea (BI) into a business opportunity (BO) and developing a business plan.
Business traction refers to the progress of a start-up company and the momentum it gains as the business grows. When traction is lacking, sales dry up and the customer base dwindles, regardless of the effort put into the enterprise. Business profitability is a function of a product or service that is remarkable, marketable and more importantly, customer oriented. Business traction thrives on business opportunities and not business ideas. A firm or business organisation who has more business opportunities than business idea will most likely gain traction and sustain it.
Entrepreneurship is moving from ideation to implementation/conceptualisation to commercialisation.
Categories of entrepreneurship:
- Quantitative (imitative) and Qualitative (innovative)
- Micro-entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial thinking/mindset) and Macro-entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial undertaking/skill set)
Quantitative (imitative) entrepreneurship – This takes a form of copy and paste practice where new technology or innovation is imitated and proliferated for commercial exploitation. It can also take a form where the product is simply manipulated, e.g, the reverse engineering of a computer programme to re-create a different programme.
Qualitative (innovative) entrepreneurship – This takes a form of originality where a product is created rather than imitated or manipulated. This is an offshoot of creativity and necessity. Necessity is the mother of…?
Micro-entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial thinking/mindset) – This aspect of entrepreneurship has to do with ideation or the process of generating and constructing an idea which may later metamorphose into a business idea. The major characteristic feature is the process of finding a suitable and stable business idea. Most start-ups are in this category.
Macro-entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial undertaking/skill set) – This aspect of entrepreneurship is concerned with the process of turning a business idea into a business opportunity and consequently, its implementation and exploitation. The major characteristic feature is the process of funding a practicable and profitable business opportunity. Many multinationals are in this category.
“Africa has reached a stage where we must stop exporting raw materials. Instead, we should work harder to become globally competitive, exporting finished products” – Goodluck Jonathan, former President of Nigeria.
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