The muddle of ‘the entrepreneur’

We did a podcasting job this week from a workshop at the Eden Project that explored the idea of the ‘entrepreneur’. There were some broadly-shared assumptions going around - such as that entrepreneurs were people who made the most of opportunities; that they were willing to risk failure in order to drive change and innovate.

A quick look at Wikipedia provides the following:

“An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a new enterprise or venture and assumes full accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome”

Interestingly, the workshop didn’t really focus on accountability as a defining characteristic of the entrepreneur. And on the willingness to risk failure - which most people believed a defining characteristic of the entrepreneur - Wikipedia also has this to say:

“The research data indicate that successful entrepreneurs are actually risk averse”

That’s somehow not surprising. Look at Dragon’s Den. Those people aren’t playing a risk game. They’re playing a game of calculated exploitation and they only put their money into things they know they can drive to success. So where do we get the idea of risk from?

The people who take risks are the crazy alchemists, the nutty inventors, the creative nomads and the random innovators. They’re the ones who throw everything into their idea with a high risk of failure. But they’re not entrepreneurs - a distinction the workshop seemed to miss. Entrepreneurs are, however, people who seize upon the inventions and the innovations and capitalise them in the right place at the right time.

So it emerges that the defining characteristics of the the entrepreneur are the eye for opportunity, the discipline and courage required to act on those opportunities and the willingness to be accountable for the whole process. While at first glance, it may seem like the entrepreneur is a risk-taker (compared with working 9-5 in the office for the rest of your life) in reality his success derives from his ability to minimise risk.

April 30, 2008 | Filed Under business insight 

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