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Entrepreneur’s Week
National Entrepreneurship Network
Closing Ceremony on 8th February 2008
Address by Mr. Rakesh Shah, Chairman, EEPC
It is, indeed, a privilege for me to address this distinguished gathering of the
future members of India’s entrepreneurial community. I am sure that the “bug of
entrepreneurship” is already in your veins and you must be ready to serve this
nation.
I must thank the organizers and particularly, Ms. Sujata Singh & Mr. Abhijan
Ganguly for inviting me to speak before you at this closing ceremony and share
some thoughts on this occasion.
While there is no official definition of entrepreneurship, following the work done at
Harvard Business School, "Entrepreneurship” can be defined as the process of
creating or seizing an opportunity and pursuing it regardless of the resources
currently controlled".
Popular writings on entrepreneurship have generally tended to romanticize
individual founders and CEOs when firms are successful, and vilifying them when
such firms fail. A lot of effort is spent on predicting who will succeed as an
entrepreneur and who will fail. The emphasis in all such analysis is to look at the
“personality” factor, along with other individual characteristics like demographic
and cultural background, to predict who will become an entrepreneur, and which
entrepreneurs will succeed.
In fact, academic research has, from time to time, come out with different facets
of personality that could determine the “entrepreneur” in a person. A great deal of
research on the personality characteristics and socio-cultural backgrounds of
successful entrepreneurs was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s. An analysis of
more than 50 studies found a consensus around six general characteristics of
entrepreneurs:
(1) commitment and determination;
(2) leadership;
(3) opportunity obsession;
(4) tolerance of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty;
(5) creativity, self-reliance and ability to adapt; and
(6) motivation to excel.
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