INTRODUCTION TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

All human beings have an urge to exercise power over other beings and objects. This urge may vary in degree from person to person. This urge to control or possess, when sublimated, allows a person to grow into a political leader, successful farmer, trader or industrialist, or a brilliant scientist, engineer or doctor. In the economic sphere of the society such persons are called entrepreneurs. In this sense, entrepreneur is a person who isolates purchase and sales opportunities and exercises her intelligence and overcoming spirit to utilise such opportunities to increase his economic power.

Small business entrepreneur play a vital role in the economy. Their spirit, ingenuity and enthusiasm make our society dynamic and provide employment opportunities, economic growth, greater efficiency through competitions and are the creators of new products and services. The most successful entrepreneur is one who influences and controls the business environment with the direct and indirect influences he exercises over the system is a critical factor in economic development and an integral part of economic transformation. The success or failure of this onerous task very much depends, therefore, on various factors external and internal to the business world.

Entrepreneurship according to Jaffrey A.Thomson " is the ability to create and build something from practically from practically nothing, fundamentally, a human, creative act. It is finding an opportunity of initiating, doing, achieving, and building an enterprise or organisation, rather than by just watching, analysing or describing one.

Peter Druker defines an entrepreneur is one who always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity. Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is a specific instrument of entrepreneurship. According to Druker, entrepreneurs have to learn to practice systematic innovation. Systematic innovation, according to him, consists in the purposeful and organised search for change and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer scope for economic or social innovation.

The term "entrepreneurial syndrome" refers to a cluster of characteristics     social, economic and behavioural, which are found to consistently occur in a pattern in different manners among successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs.

Research on entrepreneurship indicates a gradual convergence of interest in the factors that contribute to successful entrepreneurship and as attenuated to answer the following questions.

1. What are the individual psychological characteristics of an entrepreneur?
2. Is there any typical social background which characteristics an entrepreneur?
3. Are most of the successful entrepreneurs drawn from particular occupational groups?

1. Perseverance and hard work
2. Risk-taking ability
3. High aspiration
4. Willingness to learn
5. Dynamic and creative
6. Adaptable
7. Innovative
8. Good salesmanship
9. Ability to win friends and overcome crises
10. Initiative
11. Self-confidence
12. Will power
13. Determination to succeed
14. Pleasing personality, composed and tactful
15. High integrity
16. Responsible
17. Excellence in work
18. Perception of time

The research available clearly reveals that an entrepreneur is certainly different from the non-entrepreneur in terms of his psychological and social dispositions.

As a result of many studies, there is a consensus that entrepreneurship is a product of interaction among a number of factors: some of the factors are in the individual (psychological) and the rest are found in the social, cultural and economic milieu. It is perhaps an individual with certain definite propensities and with certain social and economic traits that make successful entrepreneur. Thus, one has to operate both on the individual and the milieu characteristics.