“The fundamental ingredient is to get off your butt and do something. It’s as simple as that. Lots of people have ideas, but few decide to do something about it now. Not tomorrow. Not next week, but today. The true entrepreneur He is a doer, not a dreamer.” Nolan Bushnellfounder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese’s

This is what entrepreneurship is all about. You need to have ‘fire in your stomach’ to be a successful entrepreneur; the unwavering drive to turn your business ideas into reality and success. According to Peter Drucker, entrepreneurship is “a systematic innovation, which consists in the organized and determined search for change, and is the systematic analysis of the opportunities that such changes can offer for economic and social innovation.” It is the inherent ability to build and create something relevant and successful out of virtually nothing. In a broader perspective, entrepreneurship is an attitude; a quality to seek challenging opportunities, take only calculated risks and drive profits in the manner of establishing a profitable company.

There are various roles that come with quality entrepreneurship, and most of these are intended for broader socio-economic development. The main functions of an entrepreneur are discussed below.

Entrepreneur as a risk taker.

According to Richard Cantillon, entrepreneurship is about having the willingness and foresight to take risks, while taking calculated steps to make a profit or a loss. According to him, an entrepreneur must be risk-taking, forward-thinking and efficiently alert, if not innovative in the strict sense. The role of an entrepreneur involves two types of risks; measured and unmeasured. However, a successful entrepreneur is one who has the potential to anticipate and assume excessive business risks, transforming them into business opportunities for growth and profitability.

Entrepreneur as Innovator.

Entrepreneurship has an important role in assimilating knowledge, which is not of recent use, and establishing new forms and production functions to design, produce and market new and innovative products. Joseph Schumpeter pointed out here that innovation does not mean that it has to be newly discovered. The quality of an entrepreneur lies in using existing knowledge that has never been used before in production. In addition to being an inventor, an entrepreneur must possess the potential to push the invention to lucrative commercial exploitation.

Entrepreneur as leader.

This is one of the main functions of entrepreneurship. According to Alfred Marshall, a businessman “must be a natural leader of men who can choose attendees wisely but also exercise general control over everything and preserve order and unity in the main plan of business.” He must be constantly searching for innovative methods that are guaranteed to be more cost effective currently in use. He must possess the inherent quality of leading the company and the workforce, towards a better socio-economic scenario in a broader perspective.

Entrepreneur as Restaurateur or Perceiver.

John Bates Clark sees entrepreneurship as the process responsible for maintaining the coordination that helps restore the socio-economy to the position of effective equilibrium. Through a comprehensive “discovery process,” entrepreneurs identify lucrative new opportunities and risks, leading the market toward equilibrium. The role of entrepreneurship lies in being alert to profitable business opportunities, and for this, the quality of perception is a primary feature of a successful entrepreneur.