Basically we entrepreneurs have decided to meet the needs of third parties in exchange for improving our own personal situation, in other words we decided to produce something to satisfy the needs of people that we may not even know. These people decide if the product or service that we propose meets or exceeds their expectations, if so, then the response of these people is finally the purchase.
The entrepreneur receives benefits in return if the income has exceeded the costs. For example, if I have detected that there is a group of people who seek to eat outside the home in a healthy way, I can start a business based on that premise, and I will seek to create the greatest possible value for customers to choose my product or service and that be willing to pay enough for it to cover the costs of running my business and making a profit.
All this market learning operation is based on trial and error, since the variables What ?, How ?, When ?, How much? they are in the mind of the consumer, the entrepreneur is the one who runs the risk by putting all his resources, time and money to try to "unravel" the needs of the clients and the personal ways of satisfying them.
If the entrepreneur fails, it is he who will lose the resources wagered on said undertaking; So the first characteristic of an entrepreneur is being risky, he knows that the information he has on his client may not be completely accurate, he cannot know it with certainty until he puts the combination of variables that he has decided on the market, and despite the fact that This risk is real the entrepreneur bets, and launches into the adventure.
A classic example of this is how George Eastman bet all his savings on the purchase of an old machine to make his first photographic plates, which eventually went wrong and had to respond to this by returning the money to customers in many cases, evidently it was a huge loss. And so thousands of entrepreneurs fail every day, and what happens? Incredibly many of them try again, the DNA of the entrepreneur is impregnated with that ability to take risks.
As a good entrepreneur, Eastman, the founder of Kodak, tried again, over time he managed to improve the production of these photographic plates and success came, he was successful and he won, although as we saw at the beginning he had some failures, so here we could enter the second characteristic, perseverance.
Entrepreneurship is a vital function to solve the problem of scarcity. Human needs are infinite as infinite are the cultural and personal constructions that each person makes of his own well-being. Fifty years ago, cell phones were not something that people “needed” but today it has become a vital tool that very few people can do without, so this shortage that we are talking about must be solved from this perspective that of the products and services that human beings need are subjective cultural and personal creations that do not exist in nature and must be manufactured and the resources to manufacture them are scarce.
The business function acting in a process called market looks for the most efficient ways to allocate scarce resources and thus satisfy the infinite needs of humanity, and for this it needs to process the information that is available, for example a phone manufacturer can take the advances in technology, consumer preferences, market research, distribution channels, and transforms them into knowledge that will serve to match their offer to demand, but it will always be subjective information, that is, an opinion of the entrepreneur on how allocate resources in a way that meets the expectations of consumers, always their own vision of that information that is there in the market.Due to the same subjective nature of information management, there are great possibilities of not hitting the design of the product or service, and again this combination will be tested in the market, and if it does not work, then the entrepreneur will try again using another combination of variables. Being persistent is a vital quality of the entrepreneur always linked to creativity.
Entrepreneurial creativity is precisely about creating new products, creating new business models, new forms of management, new administrative tools, new ways of satisfying needs, learning from "mistakes", correcting and trying again. For example, Steve Jobs created an entire industry based on creativity. Each of his products is based on breaking traditional paradigms, including the phrase where he said “Here we hire people who tell us what to do, not people we have to tell them to do. ”Demonstrates that intentional way of breaking with the traditional style of managing the company. Creativity is that ability to always see beyond.
So we have our three characteristics: being risky, persevering and creative.
Do you have any of these characteristics?
Whatever your answer, you should know that these three characteristics are held by all human beings, they are intrinsic characteristics of homo sapiens, they are the same characteristics that have led us since that adventure 60 thousand years ago that made us leave Africa to travel to the moon, so we all carry that entrepreneurial capacity within.
