By Abu Hamza
Entrepreneurship is the act of developing and organizing a new business taking the risk to make a profit out of it. An entrepreneur is a person who can take risks and sets up a new business to make a profit out of his/her business. Entrepreneurship, according to Onuoha (2007), “is the practice of starting new organizations or revitalizing mature organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities.” Schumpeter (1965) defined “entrepreneurs as individuals who exploit market opportunity through technical and/or organizational innovation”. (International Journal of Business and Social Science, P146, Vol. 2 No. 16; September 2011) Entrepreneurship is the driving force of any nation’s economy and society together because that entrepreneurship and businesses are very important for every country and society as it also generates jobs for other people living in the society and also fulfills peoples’ needs.
Language Entrepreneurship
Language Entrepreneurship is nothing but setting up a language company that will provide language services such as, translation, interpretation, language teaching, content writing, editing, and subtitling, etc. Entrepreneurship can be a very good career option for language professionals. The people, who speak foreign languages or who are bilingual can do a lot in Entrepreneurship as they can understand other cultures and have a unique entrepreneurial opportunity. What a linguist need is courage and passion for languages.
Characteristics of Entrepreneurship
Some characteristics make entrepreneurship successful. These are as follows:
- Risk-Taking Ability: Setting-up any new business involves a considerable amount of failure risk. So, an entrepreneur needs to be very courageous and he/she should be able to evaluate and take risks is an essential part of his/her work to be an entrepreneur.
- Innovative Ideas: For setting-up and developing new business and become a successful entrepreneur, there should be highly innovative and new ideas. The entrepreneur should have innovative ideas to create a successful business and earn profits out of the same.
- Leadership Quality: To be a successful entrepreneur, he/she should have a clear vision of his/her new startup. However, to turn the idea into reality a lot of resources and employees are required to work on it. So, to guide employees in the right direction to achieve the goal entrepreneur must have leadership qualities to deal with all the issues and activities.
- Open-Mindedness: The entrepreneur should be open-minded, as he/she has to go through several circumstances and use it as an opportunity to develop the company and make benefit from these opportunities.
- Diversity: One of the most excellent aspects of entrepreneurship is a diversity of ideas and activities. The entrepreneur should come up with diverse ideas that may also be unique in the market.
- Flexibility and adjustability: The entrepreneur should be flexible in activities and can make changes according to the situation. The businessman should be adjustable to deal with every situation and accept the changes in the products and services as per the need.
Why choose the entrepreneurship
There are several reasons to choose entrepreneurship and become an entrepreneur, these are as follow:
- Jobs Creation: Entrepreneurship creates jobs for the people living in society, so it is very important for the life of the people. Entrepreneurs take the risk and try to develop new business. As the business continues to grow, even more jobs are created.
- Bringing change: Entrepreneurship brings the change in the society through different innovative ideas and products. It also improves the lifestyle of the people and fulfills their needs.
- Nation-building: Entrepreneurship plays a major role in nation-building; it works for the nation and society together. It also earns more wealth and pays more taxes, which are being used for the nation-building and development of society. Entrepreneurs do more good deeds than the average people. Entrepreneurs are the biggest donors to NGOs for various causes. Some Entrepreneurs try to invest their money in creating solutions to help poorer communities living in the society such as clean drinking water and good health care facilities etc.
- Decreasing Poverty: Entrepreneurship tries to eradicate poverty and pulls more people out of poverty.
- To Change the World: Entrepreneur tries hard to make this planet a better world for a human being by helping people, eliminating poverty, and creating valuable products.
- No Boss: Most of the people don’t like to work under a boss, but some try to manage it and make themselves to adjust with the boss some don’t like so they became entrepreneurs as they often struggle with having a boss.
- Flexible work hours: Entrepreneurship provides flexible work hours. Many people, who want to work according to their time, enjoy entrepreneurship the most. It also allows entrepreneurs to spend quality time with family and raise young children at home or pick them up from school without having to feel guilty about it.
Abu Hamza is a research scholar and prior to joining Modlingua as one the summer interns, he has undergone specialized training in Translation Management from Modlingua