Emerging Trends in Entrepreneurship Essay Example For Students

Emerging Trends in Entrepreneurship Essay EMERGING TRENDS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP Introduction We all know that entrepreneurship is about attempting to assemble resources including innovations, finance and business acumen in an effort to transform innovations into economic goods. This may result in new organizations or may be part of revitalizing mature organizations in response to a perceived opportunity. The most obvious form of entrepreneurship is that of starting new business; however, in recent years, the term has been extended to include social and political forms of entrepreneurial activity. Entrepreneurship ranges in scale from solo projects to major undertakings creating many job opportunities. Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs. Lately more holistic conceptualizations of entrepreneurship as a specific mindset resulting in entrepreneurial initiatives in the form of social entrepreneurship, political entrepreneurship, or knowledge entrepreneurship have emerged. Social entrepreneurship is not merely an extension of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as some people would want us to believe, it is a conscious effort to contribute to a Social cause and the business enterprise is merely a medium for achieving the end results. Early beginnings The story of the entrepreneurship in India is full of ups and downs. During the pre British and British era, the entrepreneur was seen more as a broker or money lender, bound by caste affiliations, religious, cultural and social forces right from the philosophy of dharma down to the joint family system. Entrepreneurship as we understand it today was not initially developed from this social segment. In addition, a number of political, economic factors too had an inhibiting effect on the spirit of enterprise among Indians in those times. Some of these were a lack of political unity and stability, the absence of effective communication systems, the existence of regulatory barriers and oppressive tax policies, and the prevalence of varied currency systems – all these combined together to restrict the growth of ntrepreneurship until around the third decade of the 19th century. The religious system of education and the low social esteem accorded to business were other potent forces that discouraged the advancement of large scale commercial ventures in pre-independence India . Thankfully however, the first half of the present century witnessed a gradual change for the better to the prevailing scenario. During this period, there was a growing tendency among the locals to take to busi ness. The spread of secular education, surge in nationalist feelings and social reform movements must have given a boost to this phase of the emergence of entrepreneurship in the country. Moreover, the two world wars and the enormous business opportunities they created for the growth of industrial ventures brought about a radical change in the attitudes of the public in favor of industrial entrepreneurship and broadened the vision of Indian businessmen. Independent India could now claim to have created a conducive climate for the spread of entrepreneurship. It is in this perspective that the later evolution and growth of entrepreneurship in India has to be understood. In spite of the significant presence of large and medium enterprises in the economic scene, it is the small sector that that has always dominated the forays into entrepreneurship in India. In fact, this is quite true of most of the developing countries. It is not that the large and medium enterprises do not manifest entrepreneurship as their smaller counterparts. The reason most likely to be is that it is the small enterprise in which the presence of the entrepreneur is most visible. Also in a country like India which is vast , diverse, and less developed, small enterprises have a very definite role to play not only by contributing towards employment and income generation, but also in attending to the specific needs of a large proportion of   customers. Their greater visibility may also be attributable to the fact that in spite of all odds on the policy and market fronts, several thousand s of small enterprises thrive in a large number of production spheres. More importantly, the small scale sector has helped widen the entrepreneurial base by giving rise to a new class of entrepreneurs from the ranks of employees, business executive, technicians and professionals. Thus was broken the earlier myth that entrepreneurship is an exclusive domain of the socially conservative, traditional trading communities. In fact, in this 1960 study of small entrepreneurs in the then State of Madras, James Bean observed that entrepreneurs could emerge from a wide range of social and economical backgrounds. Contribution of the NEN and other organizations There are various associations, tie-ups and NGOs who are doing a yeoman service to the cause of entrepreneurship both abroad and in India. Notable among these are Evan Carmichael, TIE and our very own NEN (National Entrepreneurship Network) founded by Mr Romesh Wadhwani, an NRI entrepreneur who is the owner of Symhony Corporation in Silicon Valley. The aim of NEN which is a non profit organization is to foster the spirit of Entrepreneurship among the youth in India’s educational Institutions and assist them in running successful businesses. The need for networking in entrepreneurship Neither entrepreneurship nor the phenomenon of innovation at the intersection of business and natural systems can be fully understood without a network perspective. Entrepreneurship is best understood as a process of innovative change, one which requires stakeholder engagement, cultivation, and ongoing management. The emergence of innovation depends on the ability of entrepreneurial leaders to identify and mobilize the necessary resources from willing network participants like those who bring information, skills, perspectives, funds, materials, buildings and equipment to create the change in product or process design. What is Social Entrepreneurship? A social entrepreneur is someone who recognizes a social problem and uses entrepreneurial principles to organize, create, and manage a venture to make social change. Whereas a business entrepreneur typically measures performance in profit and return, a social entrepreneur assesses success in terms of the impact s/he has on society as well as in profit and return. While social entrepreneurs often work through nonprofits and citizen groups, many now are working in the private and governmental sectors and making important impacts on society. Social entrepreneurs are individuals with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social problems. They are ambitious and persistent, tackling major social issues and offering new ideas for wide-scale change. Rather than leaving societal needs to the government or business sectors, social entrepreneurs find what is not working and solve the problem by changing the system, spreading the solution, and persuading entire societies to take new leaps. The main aim of social entrepreneurship as well as a social enterprise is to further social and environmental goals for a good cause. Although social entrepreneurs often are associated with nonprofits, this need not be incompatible with making a profit. Social enterprises are for ‘more-than-profit,’ using blended value business models that combine a revenue-generating business with a social-value-generating structure or component. A social entrepreneur in the twenty-first century will redefine entrepreneurship as we know it, due to their progressive business models. Rather than maximizing shareholder value, the main aim of social enterprises is to generate profit to further their social and or environmental goals. This can be accomplished through a variety of ways and depends on the structure of the social enterprise. The profit from a business could be used to support a social aim, such as funding the programming of a non-profit organization. Moreover, a business could accomplish its social aim through its operation by employing individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds or lending to micro-businesses that have difficulty in securing investment from mainstream lenders. Social innovation and entrepreneurship Faced with new complexities some companies are forging innovative paths to reconcile human impacts on the environment without compromising economic performance and the provision of high quality goods and services. Those individuals and companies are innovators creating future goods and services, future production processes and markets, and future ways of conducting business. They are engaged in processes that will redefine the firm toward a network innovation model. For this reason the pioneers provide us with windows into the future. The innovators draw from a range of sources to guide their actions, from simple opportunity recognition (e. . identifying unmet needs in the market) to deeper understanding of changing scientific information and social conditions from which opportunities emerge. The social innovation research field reaches across a number of academic disciplines such as business, public administration, social policy and psychology. It is an interesting question as to wh en, and whether, it will become established as a separate field. The Role of B Schools Social entrepreneurship is increasingly finding its way into B-school campuses to facilitate future managers to choose the right business strategies, keeping in mind their impact on society and the environment. With the focus on the aspect of social responsibility for business leaders of tomorrow, management institutes across the country are coming up with various initiatives to promote social entrepreneurship. According to the business schools, the initiatives help blend the entrepreneurial skills of the corporate world with the social purpose of non-governmental organizations. And the initiatives from the business schools are also luring an increasing crop of professionals preferring to take the path of becoming social entrepreneurs by shunning cushy jobs. Aborigines And Their Place In Politics EssayThe first enterprise that comes to mind in international ventures is that of Ashoka (www. ashoka. org). Ashoka, founded by Bill Drayton is the global association of the world’s leading social entrepreneurs—men and women with system changing solutions for the world’s most urgent social problems. Since 1981, they have elected over 2,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to a global network of peers in more than 60 countries. Other notable examples of International Social entrepreneurship ventures are iven below:. †¢ Scojo Foundation http://www. scojofoundation. org Vision-Spring, founded in 1999 by Dr. Jordan Kassalow as a spin off from Scojo LLC, a distributor of high end glasses in the US, seeks to provide through an effective supply chain and economies of scale, high-quality reading glasses, previously unavailable to the communit ies where they worked, at an affordable price. Scojo Foundation, because of its relationship to Scojo Vision, LLC, is able to source glasses at low cost and that low cost is passed onto the Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs. The Scojo Vision Entrepreneurs, in turn, sell the glasses to customers in their communities thereby enabling the women to earn a sustainable source of income. †¢ The Schwabb Foundation http://www. schwabfound. org/ This organization does not help anybody with money, instead it helps social entrepreneurs with their resources; they connect interested investors and social entrepreneurs through technology. They have also connected with schools all around the world, which train social entrepreneurs for them. They conduct awards for the social entrepreneur of the year; they also conduct various events for social entrepreneurs. They have many research papers and articles; they also have case studies on various social enterprises. Other notable contributions include: †¢ Bill Drayton (U. S. ) – who founded Ashoka. org, Youth Venture, and Get America Working! †¢ Marian Wright Edelman (U. S. ) Founder and president of the Childrens Defense Fund (CDF) and advocate for disadvantaged Americans and children. †¢ Dr. Abraham M. George (India) Founder of The George Foundation (TGF). †¢ Alan Khazei (U. S. ) Co-Founder of City Year, a leading national service program. †¢ Dr. Verghese Kurien (India) Founder of the AMUL Dairy Project. †¢ Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (India) Founded Art of Living Foundation and International Association for Human Values. †¢ Muhammad Yunus (Bangladesh) Founder of microcredit and the Grameen Bank. He was awarded the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. †¢ Dr. Maria Montessori (Italy) developed the Montessori approach to early childhood education. †¢ Margaret Sanger (U. S. ) founder of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, she led the movement for family planning efforts around the world. Florence Nightingale (U. K. ) founder of modern nursing, she established the first school for nurses and fought to improve hospital conditions. †¢ John Muir (U. S. ) Naturalist and conservationist, he established the National Park System and helped in the founding of The Sierra Club. †¢ Jean Monnet (France) who was responsible for the reconstruction of the French economy following World War II, including the establish ment of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). Challenges to social entrepreneurship †¢ The first challenge is from governments. A majority of them have yet to recognize social entrepreneurship as a legitimate form of enterprise. This recognition is essential for finding ways to promote it through fiscal and legislative incentives, including the, the elimination of burdensome regulations, review of tax laws , arbitrary decision-making and other arduous requirements and inefficient practices that hamper social entrepreneurs. †¢ The second challenge is from organizations to encourage businesses and discover the competitive advantages offered by working in partnership with social entrepreneurs. From a financial perspective, reaching untapped markets can be greatly facilitated by linking with social entrepreneurs who have spent a long time in designing; implementing and refining innovative ways of bringing excluded groups into the marketplace. From a human resources perspective, the ability to attract top talent is a major challenge for companies. But the best and the brightest today are looking for more than impressive salaries and stock options. They want something that gives meaning to their work and their lives. Supporting social entrepreneurs in different ways shows that companies care about more than the bottom line. Finally, corporate social responsibility is not about setting up separate corporate foundations to reach excluded populations through top down programs that compete with social entrepreneurs. Nor is corporate social responsibility about relegating the â€Å"social† work to the corporate foundation while the corporation carries on its business as usual. Working with social entrepreneurs should be part of the core business strategy of every company. The third challenge for social entrepreneurs is from foundations and philanthropists who should be the ones catalyzing social transformation by supporting social innovators. Foundations and high net worth individuals are well placed to engage in that process, as they are free of two forces that dominate the decisions of governments and business respectively – the ballot box and the bottom line. But many foundations and philanthropists seem content to fund projects that they hope will produce dramatic results in just 2 years or even less. However, no social entrepreneur can transform a system in that time. It takes years, sometimes even decades. There is a need support for scaling up successful social innovations as social entrepreneurs have now developed the metrics to prove what they do has results. †¢ The academic sector presents another major challenge for social entrepreneurship. Although there have been significant strides, particularly in the area of university education, we have still a far way to go as regards instilling entrepreneurial thinking in students from a young age. And this is because we all know that entrepreneurship is not something to be learned out of a book; it must be cultivated and experienced. The entrepreneurial mindset has been identified by the following six attributes, namely commitment and determination; leadership; opportunity obsession; tolerance of risk, ambiguity and uncertainty, creativity; self-reliance, ability to adapt; and motivation to excel. How well are our educational institutions doing to instil these characteristics? Finally, social entrepreneurs must work together to build their network through the establishment of a professional teamwork that moves everyone beyond their personal goals and initiatives to a larger common purpose – and that is working across sectors to create institutions that can work for common causes and respond to unprecedented global challenges. Why social entrepreneurship? What is the reason for this definite shift from merely doing your own thing and making money to doing something for a common cause and running it as a successful venture? Some suggested reasons could be †¢ The desire to fulfil a common social need and gain personal satisfaction as well as recognition from society at large. †¢ A means to serve interests of weaker and unprivileged sections of society and leverage this to existing businesses †¢ Today’s world order realizes that greed does not pay in the longer run, but goodwill does. Whatever the reasons, the writing on the wall is very clear that social entrepreneurship is here to stay and it is in fact the way of the future of entrepreneurship. Conclusion This paper has attempted to give an insight into the meaning of entrepreneurship, trace the early beginnings in our country and its evolution through history. It has also tried to bring out the emergence of social entrepreneurship as the new face of entrepreneurship, its raison d’etre, evolution and development in the world all over. It has brought out some examples of social entrepreneurship in our country as well as in the international scene with their aims, aspirations and followers. It tells us the possible reasons for a gradual shift towards social entrepreneurship and how it is the way to the future. Lastly, it lists out certain challenges to social entrepreneurship. References 1. The definition of entrepreneurship from http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Entrepreneurship 2. An article entitled â€Å"Entrepreneurship – The Indian story by Tiyas Biswas and Dr P. P. Sengupta in http://www. indianmba. com/Faculty_Column/FC791/fc791. tml 3. Social entrepreneurship inputs from www. ashoka. org 4. Information on social Ventures from www. svn. org. 5. An article titled â€Å"B schools get social about Entrepreneurship† by Chitra Unnithan and Vinay Umarji in http://www. business-standard. com/india/news/b-schools-get-social-about-entrepreneurship/333830/. 6. An article titled â€Å"Are entrepreneurs born or made? † by Dan Bricklin from http://hbswk. hbs. edu/archive/2569. html. 7. Growing