Demystifying Entrepreneurship – What’s it about?
Demystifying Entrepreneurship
What’s all the fuss about entrepreneurship?!
Entrepreneur is admittedly not an easy word to spell – for the first few attempts, many may miss out an ‘o’ or add the odd ‘u’…
Putting the spelling of the word aside for a minute though, what does being an entrepreneur actually mean?
Entrepreneurship is a mindset that can be adopted and a behaviour that can be taught and learnt (especially well through doing) – the myth of entrepreneurs being ‘born not made´ has been largely shown to be the exception, rather than the rule. This is encouraging because there is therefore hope for us all!
Intrepreneurship (no, that’s not a misspelling!)
Entrepreneurship is not limited to starting a new company of your own initiative, own financial backing etc – you can act and be an entrepreneur within an established company, such as Google, Cisco and the engineering consulting giant ARUP to name but a few, earning a good salary and gaining the satisfaction that your creative efforts are being truly realised and making a difference. Working in such an environment is fun and rewarding. Being an entrepreneur of this kind is called intrapreneurship – thankfully there is an entrepreneurial path for everyone!
Quite simply (!), one definition of entrepreneurship is:
‘The process of creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial… and social risks, and receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence.’
The beauty of the above definition is that it lays out all the key points we wish to cover in this short piece – yes short; we want people to be inspired by reading this and not have that ‘heavy-headed’ sleepiness you get after emerging from a long lecture!
Time for a sentence dissection…
‘…creating something new…’
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The word ‘newness’ is understood by different people in different ways – it’s impossible to have absolute knowledge of every concept/industry sector/ field of study etc out there in the world, so what may at first appear to be new to one person may in fact be knowledge taken for granted by another person.
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Think about your own subject specialities – if you were a biologist say, would you know all the latest developments in the internet space (ignoring the case where the biologist has an outside interest in the internet of course!). Likewise, would the computing student be expected to know about the latest in RNAi research? Exactly!
In short, if you are working within a particular field of study and are familiar with the space and see an opportunity to improve a process or do something that hasn’t been done before, you are one step on the entrepreneurial path.
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Of course, thinking and actually doing are completely different things – the transition from one to the other involves some effort and commitment…
‘devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial… and social risks‘
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In economics, there’s the concept of ‘Risk and Reward‘ – in essence, the greater the risk of doing something, the greater the reward will be from its successful realisation.
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There’s no soft way to say this – entrepreneurial activities involve risk!
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Does this mean that if you are someone that hates risk (perfectly reasonable to be too!) you have to scrub entrepreneurship from you vocabulary list? Absolutely not!
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As mentioned earlier, entrepreneurship is not only limited to starting your own company from you own ideas and your own financial backing etc – people that do all the aforementioned groundwork need talented people to work for them in their start-up. These people could be you! – We get loads of requests from start-ups looking for Imperial graduates. You’d work for a highly competitive salary whilst being able to indulge in your creative side as well – everyone has a creative side and their own ideas, it just takes the right kind of environment to allow them to flourish.
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Another myth about entrepreneurship is that it takes up your whole life – whilst we won’t deny that being an entrepreneur is time-consuming, if you want the high rewards, this invariably takes effort. The same argument could be levelled at any industry – would investment bankers earn as much if it weren’t for the 16-18 hour days? Probably not.
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The difference with entrepreneurship though is that you are doing your ‘job’ because you love it and want to create social and global value (notice we didn’t say wealth, which is different…).
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It eventually gets to a stage where work ceases to feel like work anymore and you don’t think about the time that has passed because you’re working for the sheer love of it – believe it or not, this is not a romantic notion! Once you experience it, you realise that it’s real and tres cool, hence why we are trying to spread the love with Imperial Entrepreneurs.
‘…receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence.’
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Finally, the sweet rewards.
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Rewards is a subjective matter and depends very much on the individual - for some, money may be the dominant driving force, for others such as social-enterprise and not-for-profit company founders, personal satisfaction may top their list. For others still, it may be complete financial and corporate commitment independence.
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Usually it’s a combination of all three, with individual importance attached to each, again, dependent on the individual.
Whilst you’re thinking about the next stage in your life we urge you to consider what motivates you in terms of rewards. Is it mainly money? Personal satisfaction? Independence?
By being an entrepreneur, you have a chance to balance these desired outcomes like in no other career, whether you’re starting from absolutely nothing or deciding whether to be an ‘intrapreneur’ working within a large company. Remember, entrepreneurship is a fluid process and just because you start a company, join a start-up or take an entrepreneurial mindset to a corporate job today doesn’t mean that you’ll be there for the rest of your life! Entrepreneurs make the bulk of their money on ‘exit’ such as the sale of the company, so there’s always to opportunity to go off and do something new and exciting!
Finally, Imperial Entrepreneurs is here to help you familiarise yourselves with the entrepreneurial process and build up a contacts network during your studies, so that by the time you graduate, you are in a strong position to go out into the world and succeed as talented Imperial Alumni.
A little something to get you going:
Hisrich, R.D., Peters, M., Shepher, D. (2008). Entrepreneurship. 7th Ed. McGraw-Hill, Singapore.