Entrepreneurial Skills — Unit 4

Session 1: Entrepreneurship and Society

Ways of Earning a Living

• Wage employment: working for a person or organisation and getting paid for that work.
• Self-employment: starting a business to satisfy the needs of people.
• Entrepreneur: a self-employed person who always tries to make their business better by taking risks and trying new ideas.

Where Entrepreneurs Work

• Entrepreneurs run their businesses in a market.
• A market has people who buy products/services and people who sell them.
• Buying and selling benefits everyone involved and helps grow the area and society.

What Entrepreneurs Do

• Fulfil Customer Needs: demand means a product/service that people want; entrepreneurs find out what people want and use creativity to meet that demand.
• Use Local Materials: entrepreneurs use material and people available around them to make products at low cost.
• Help Society: entrepreneurs make profits through activities that benefit society, such as saving the environment or building schools and hospitals.

Effects of Entrepreneurs on Society

• Create Jobs: as a business grows, entrepreneurs hire more people, creating more jobs.
• Sharing of Wealth: as entrepreneurs grow their business, people working for them and in related businesses also earn more and live a better quality of life.
• Lower Price of Products: as more entrepreneurs sell the same product, its price goes down (e.g., mobile phone prices reduced as more entrepreneurs started selling them in India).

Session 2: Qualities and Functions of an Entrepreneur

Qualities of a Successful Entrepreneur

• Confident — believes in themselves and their abilities.
• Keeps trying new ideas in their business.
• Patient.
• Creative — thinks differently about business ideas.
• Takes responsibility for their actions and mistakes.
• Takes decisions after thinking about them.
• Works hard.
• Does not give up when facing a difficulty.

Functions of an Entrepreneur

• Making Decisions: decides what to produce or sell, how much, and where to sell.
• Managing the Business: plans the future of the business, arranges raw material, hires people, and checks that plans are being followed.
• Dividing Income: spends the business’s money to buy material, pay rent of the building, and pay salaries to people.
• Taking Risk: risk is the chance of something going wrong (e.g., fires, lost items, theft); an entrepreneur takes such risks.
• Create a New Method, Idea or Product: an entrepreneur is always trying new things to increase their importance and income.

Session 3: Myths about Entrepreneurship

What is a Myth?

• A myth, or misconception, is a false belief or opinion about something.

Misconception 1: “Every business idea needs to be unique or special.”

• Reality: a person can take an idea already in the market and do something different with it (e.g., Ganesh added luxury cars like Mercedes and BMW to his ordinary car rental business).

Misconception 2: “A person needs a lot of money to start a business.”

• The money used to start a business is called capital.
• Reality: not every business needs a lot of capital to start; a business can be started with whatever amount of money is available and grown bigger over time.

Misconception 3: “Only a person having a big business is an entrepreneur.”

• Reality: no business is big or small — if a person is running a business to fulfil a customer need, they are an entrepreneur (e.g., Sheila, a taxi driver who added good customer service to stand out).

Misconception 4: “Entrepreneurs are born, not made.”

• Reality: being an entrepreneur starts with a way of thinking — believing that anything is possible and working on an idea to make it different; an entrepreneur is a person who does whatever it takes to make the business successful.

Session 4: Entrepreneurship as a Career Option

What is a Career?

• A career is a line of work that a person takes up for life.
• There are two ways to earn a living: self-employment and wage employment.
• A self-employed person running a business to satisfy a need by trying new ideas is called an entrepreneur.

The Entrepreneurial Career Process

• Enter: the entrepreneur starts by entering the market to do business (e.g., Sanjana starts a small grocery store).
• Survive: the entrepreneur competes with many others already in the market and manages to sustain and grow (e.g., Sanjana’s store survives competition and expands to two more floors).
• Grow: once the business is stable, the entrepreneur expands further (e.g., after five years, Sanjana opens a chain of four more grocery stores, and plans to expand to two other cities).