What is an 'Entrepreneur'

An entrepreneur is an individual who, rather than working as an employee, founds and runs a small business, assuming all the risks and rewards of the venture. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as an innovator, a source of new ideas, goods, services and business/or procedures.

Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy. These are the people who have the skills and initiative necessary to anticipate current and future needs and bring good new ideas to market. Entrepreneurs who prove to be successful in taking on the risks of a startup are rewarded with profits, fame and continued growth opportunities. Those who fail suffer losses and become less prevalent in the markets.


BREAKING DOWN 'Entrepreneur'
Entrepreneurship is one of the resources economists categorize as integral to production, the other three being land/natural resources, labor and capital. An entrepreneur combines the first three of these to manufacture goods or provide services. He or she typically creates a business plan, hires labor, acquires resources and financing, and provides leadership and management for the business.

Entrepreneurs commonly face many obstacles when building their companies. Three that many of them cite as the most challenging are: overcoming bureaucracy, hiring talent and obtaining financing.

Financing New Ventures
Given the riskiness of a new venture, the acquisition of captial funding is particularly challenging, and many entrepreneurs deal with it via bootstrapping: financing a business using methods such as using their own money, providing sweat equity to reduce labor costs, minimizing inventory and factoring receivables.

While some entrepreneurs are lone players struggling to get small businesses off the ground on a shoestring, others take on partners armed with greater access to capital and other resources. In these situations, new firms may acquire financing from venture capitalists, angel investors, hedge funds, crowdsourcing or through more traditional sources such as bank loans.

Definitions of Entrepreneurship
Economists have never had a consistent definition of "entrepreneur" or "entrepreneurship" (the word "entrepreneur" comes from the French verb entreprendre, meaning "to undertake"). Though the concept of an entrepreneur existed and was known for centuries, the classical and neoclassical economists left entrepreneurs out of their formal models: They assumed that perfect information would be known to fully rational actors, leaving no room for risk-taking or discovery. It wasn't until the middle of the 20th century that economists seriously attempted to incorporate entrepreneurship into their models.

Three thinkers were central to the inclusion of entrepreneurs: Joseph Schumpeter, Frank Knight and Israel Kirzner. Schumpeter suggested that entrepreneurs – not just companies – were responsible for the creation of new things in the search of profit. Knight focused on entrepreneurs as the bearers of uncertainty and believed they were responsible for risk premiums in financial markets. Kirzner thought of entrepreneurship as a process that led to discovery.

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 Source:  INVESTOPEDIA

                           

Hi guys, it's exactly 349 days since my last article here, and I have missed y'all so much!
Life has been happening to me, and I plan on telling you guys every single bit of it, because, there are lessons to be learnt, ideas to recreate and new milestones to hit!
Welcome to a new day.

Your favorite entrepreneur!
Amalia Substance
13/11/2017