Entrepreneurship is an adventurous journey, which has far-reaching impacts on the entrepreneur as well as society as a whole. That’s why the importance of entrepreneurship has to be understood in the light of the value-added benefits that this exciting journey has to offer.
The importance of entrepreneurship can be understood with the much sought after value-added benefits that accrue with entrepreneurial businesses. Entrepreneurship adds a unique dynamism and innovativeness to business building. It sets the process of a business building onto the path of making it an action-packed, desirable adventure of a lifetime, which stops at no limitations.
These are the intriguing reasons why the importance of entrepreneurship is paramount and can be further elaborated as follows:
1. Development of New Entrepreneurs:
Entrepreneurship promotes development of new entrepreneurs especially in the case of small to medium-sized entrepreneurial ventures. This is because one of the main concerns of these enterprises is to conserve all of their resources.
Like an old adage goes, “It takes a genius to live in poverty;any idiot can live in luxury.” This is exactly why entrepreneurship breeds more entrepreneurs. They are always on their toes to exercise all of their creativity to find ways for better productivity and growth to be achieved in a sustained manner, while minimizing resources usage. If you observe closely, you will find almost all of the team members of a small to medium sized entrepreneurial venture to have entrepreneurial qualities, attitude and skills. Many of them later break away and start their own independent entrepreneurial ventures
2. Inculcation of Innovation as an Integral Element in Business:
Innovation is a natural extension of conservation of resources for productivity and growth. Entrepreneurship is synonymous with innovation also because the entire ecosystem of entrepreneurship is highly competitive. Both these elements, lead to the fact that entrepreneurial ventures not just indulge in constant innovation, but also make sure that such innovative discoveries are also implemented and commercialized.
That’s why many times leapfrog innovations become quite a valid revenue generation source for entrepreneurial ventures. They also define new trends in products and technology, reinventing and redefining new markets plus business environments.
3. Promotion of Research and Development:
Research and Development is the most natural outcome of compulsion for conserving the resources and need for innovation. Incidentally, most entrepreneurial ventures realize this and place high level of importance on research and development. As a result, most countries have mutually beneficial working relationships amongst the governments, educational institutions and entrepreneurial ventures promoting and nurturing the spirit of entrepreneurship. In this regard, entrepreneurship is celebrated and recognized as one of the strongest pillars of research and development
4. Creation of New Job Opportunities:
The importance of entrepreneurship is evident in its ability to create several job openings. Many of these jobs are at entry levels and they provide the most necessary on-the-job learning and training to the candidates freshly out of academic institutions.
Importance of entrepreneurship is also in creating several job opportunities for unskilled and partially skilled workers as they are most utilized for giving a physical form to the innovative ideas. Many entrepreneurial ventures thus become a ready resource for supplying trained workers to the bigger companies.
5. Development of Resilience and Risk Taking Appetite in Emerging Business Leaders:
The importance of entrepreneurship is also evident in the curious risk taking appetite of emerging business leaders. It is a well-known fact that entrepreneurs, in their eagerness to prove themselves tend to take more risks while managing to land on their feet.
Uncalculated risk taking is also one of the major reasons for most entrepreneurial ventures to fail in their very first year. Yet, the importance of entrepreneurship continues to hold ground in its indomitable spirit.
Since many entrepreneurs regularly emerge as business leaders, they represent a unique blend of resilience, curiosity,zeal, unconquerable spirit and risk taking appetite.
Most successful entrepreneurs also show an uncanny ability for taking decisions based on calculated risks rather than takingunreasonablerisks. This adds to their resilience quotient, which most business management institutes just call, “gifted business acumen”, and find rather hard to define, leave alone to teach to their students
6. Valuable Assets for Economy, Social Change and Community Development:
Entrepreneurship lends incredible support to the economy and national income of any country by promoting retail products in a large range of industries. Entrepreneurship in real estate development creates more properties for both commercial and residential purposes. Entrepreneurship creates more cashflow and thus enhances the standards of education, recreation, community activities – including religious, social and welfare activities also.
This sets social change in motion and creates a cascading effect with creating more followers getting on to the entrepreneurial bandwagon.
7. Overall Enhancement of Standard of Living of the Society:
The countries in which the governments encourage and support entrepreneurship tend to show a fast overall change, which trickles down to affect every part of the society, and raises the standard of living of the people as a whole.
The importance of entrepreneurship is undeniable in its generation of wealth, which contributes for enhancement of lifestyle, expansion of the minds and creates self sustaining growth opportunities in all the spheres.
There are however certain examples like that of Italy where unbridled importance on entrepreneurship also led to large scale negative impact on the growth of the economy. High levels of self-employment generated as a result of entrepreneurship produced fragmentation and resulted in loss of national income, instead of the expected growth. This may just be a reminder that too much of a good thing is also not good. A balanced approach between big enterprises and entrepreneurship venturesencouraging self-employment is therefore, the most desirable state for the economic growth of a country
