Question

Recently, entrepreneurship has become a popular business buzz word. Not unlike the leadership education debate, there are questions as to whether you can teach entrepreneurship, or if this is something that some special few are “born with”. Taking into consideration,  (a) Entrepreneurial Capability, (b)  Challenges of Entrepreneurship and (c) strategies; How to discuss this in relation to the challenges that entrepreneurs face either within an existing company (intrapreneurs) or as a new startup looking to validate a concept with reference to:

1. What skills and experience are the most vital? How are these acquired?
2. Can strategy help an entrepreneur, or is instinct the most guiding force?

P.S: Can you provide with referenceing also so as to be able to understand the perspective?

Answer 1

A successful entrepreneur is like a great salesman. Entrepreneurs go through a lot of rejections and become successful. Rejections are in every step - starting from the idea that they have to translate into a business, pitching for investors - also called as angel investors, putting a team together, building a product or a service line, marketing, sales, acquiring, customer adoption, servicing and finally float their firm.

Not all entrepreneurs are successful or fall near to success. A capable entrepreneur is the one who puts everything together and believes in his idea and can visualize the outcome. Entrepreneurs go through many hardships, as mentioned earlier they go through rejections, every step they take will throw a challenge at them. Out of all the core challenges is to maximize profits with limited expenditure and resources, be it a job, startup, or entrepreneur the goal is the same to maximize profits with skin-tight boundaries. Having great coordination and sync among the people in a team who do not treat the job as "just a job" but perform with passion is a very vital point for success. Operating in the right place at the right time also matters for a successful business to sustain.

An individual wanting to become an entrepreneur has several reasons behind it, Few are born with the skill to become a successful entrepreneur - especially those who have an innovative or cutting edge idea that flourishes into a great business and eventually turns into a multi-billion-dollar company, few are trained to become an entrepreneur, few entrepreneurs work as salaried employees in a firm for a long tenure, later they quit and float their firm with the help of skills and experience they had gained.

Building robust strategies is vital, any successful business that you may know is built on strong planning, coordination, and strategic execution of those plans.

Many institutes have identified and introduced many courses specifically for entrepreneurs where the aspiring entrepreneurs can get trained and become entrepreneurs and implement the learned strategies.

*The above is not copied or inspired by any source or reference from websites or books. It is an individual experience and observation.