An entrepreneur is a person who organizes and manages a business undertaking, assuming all the risk involved for the sake of profit.
According to Joseph Alois Schumpeter, the famed economist of the 20th Century, “Entrepreneurs are not necessarily motivated by profit, but regard it as a standard for measuring achievement or success.”
An entrepreneur can be simply defined as a person who perceives an opportunity, plans for it, starts up the business, manages it and reaps the profits. An entrepreneur is an individual who instead of being an employee, establishes a business enterprise that manufactures a certain commodity or service, which is available for sale to the masses at a predefined price. An entrepreneur is commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes.
Merriam Webster defines an entrepreneur as:
A person who starts a business and is willing to risk loss in order to make money;
The one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise.
To expound this definition, it can be said that entrepreneurs possess the capacity to influence any economy. They are the people with the necessary skills and initiative to take a concept to market, and translate it into a formidable and profitable business venture. An entrepreneur never shies away from taking risks, as he knows that the reward for taking such risks would be the multitude of profits to be reaped in the future from the enterprise that he has started.
To put together an enterprise, an entrepreneur makes available the capital required to bear all risks in the nascent stages of business activity. He is also responsible for monitoring and controlling all the business activities being carried out by his enterprise. The entrepreneur is usually a sole proprietor, a partner, or the one who owns the majority of shares in an incorporated venture.
The qualities or character traits that can be identified with an entrepreneur are:
- greatly values self-reliance;
- strives for distinction through excellence;
- is highly optimistic (otherwise nothing would be undertaken), and;
- always favors challenges of medium risk (neither too easy, nor ruinous).