Be your own boss ! Workplace Freedom ! StartUp India ! Make-In-India ! Entrepreneurship !
All these tags are glossy-enough to stimulate any individual's desires of being an entrepreneur. These days, everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. To keep up with this suddenly trendy career, universities across the country are providing entrepreneurship programs.
Entrepreneurship has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup, offering a product, process or service for sale or hire, and the people who do so are called 'Entrepreneurs'.
There has been a debate, that, “Can Entrepreneurship be taught?”
In my opinion, we can teach entrepreneurship, but can't necessarily create entrepreneurs.
We can teach the concepts of entrepreneurship to the aspiring entrepreneurs, just like we teach to an accountant, an engineer, a doctor, or a lawyer. We can teach the founders to avoid the common mistakes. We can teach him/her to make informed decisions and drive the processes based on these historic mistakes.
On the other hand, I feel that, entrepreneurship is like spirituality. It comes from within, from your heart, from your soul. Entrepreneurship is all about 'intent'. Entrepreneurship is about finding a meaning to the existence, the truth, the freedom and the passion of running a self-generated business.
Entrepreneurs should have a wide array of personal experiences to deal with unexpected people and situations. And this is only possible with deeper understanding of the real world.
We consider the example of OLA Cabs. Its founder – Bhavish Aggarwal – had started his entrepreneurship journey after working in Microsoft Research for 2 years. His venture wasn’t cab aggregation at the beginning. It was a Holiday and Tour Planning business. It is said that, once while traveling he had rented a car and had a bad experience then. That was the turning point when his earlier venture olatrips was converted to what we know today – olacabs.
Arguably, you can teach almost all the activities related to launching and growing a venture, and we do this every day in B-schools everywhere. This is because, at the end of the day, these are fundamental business skills and processes, which aren't going to change.
You can definitely explain the business model of how a pizza is to be delivered within 30 minutes or how not to use this same speedy-delivery model to deliver a book.
The differentiator is the 'intent' and 'passion' to carry out the business. If you don't love pizzas or books, it could be very difficult to empathize with the business.
The old ways of teaching entrepreneurship through stories of successful entrepreneurs and failed ventures is loosing its shine. It should be both, teaching individuals to build ventures and also teaching them to think and act entrepreneurially.
Entrepreneurs should have the mindset of taking initiatives, courage of taking risks, working beyond limits to build sustainable business models, communication skills, never-say-die attitude and so on.
Designing a business model can be taught, but nobody can teach you to be a businessman !
Source - Prof. Akshay Vyavahare
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