The combined aspects of both innovation and entrepreneurship are gaining increasing popularity amidst the emerging and growing challenges in the business sphere. The growth of entrepreneurial activities increased by around 17 percent during 2019 in the United States. Budding entrepreneurs are required to gain a thorough knowledge of the concepts of both innovation and entrepreneurship and also avidly understand the role of creativity and innovation in entrepreneurship.
Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship is identified as the pursuit of an emerging opportunity for expanding the market base of products and services or for designing a new product or service offering to meet novel consumer needs. Some essential characteristics that help in determining successful entrepreneurship are identified as follows:
Curiosity
Curiosity is an essential characteristic that encourages entrepreneurs in identifying emerging opportunities in the business and consumer market.
Structured Experimentation
Coupled with the aspect of curiosity the entrepreneur is also required to evaluate the worth of pursuing the identified opportunity.
Adaptability
In terms of adaptability, entrepreneurs are required to readily adapt to changing circumstances and potentially respond to emerging challenges.
Ability in taking Decisions
The entrepreneur, in the pursuit of gaining success, is required to be strongly and readily decisive in nature. Being a leader, the entrepreneur is required to guide every aspect of the business starting from funding and allocation of resources to formulation of business strategies.
Team Building Capability
The entrepreneur is essentially a team worker. The entrepreneur is well aware of one’s strengths, capabilities, and weaknesses. The development of effective teams helps the entrepreneur in countering shortcomings and thereby to meet institutional and business objectives in a successful manner.
Ability to tolerate risks and face failures
The entrepreneur is needed to be a being who bears the capability for countering business risks and adjusting to business failures. The entrepreneurs are required to persistently work in learning from present mistakes and thereby in successfully meeting business and institutional objectives.
Innovative and Visionary Mindset
The entrepreneur is required to be someone that bears an innovative mindset in terms of being able to eye different types of market and business opportunities. Likewise, the entrepreneur is required to be an ideal visionary in terms of guiding the business enterprise for retaining its position as a successful player in the long run.
Importance of Innovation in Business
In every organization, a conscious effort is required to be undertaken for countering the rise of stagnation. The incorporation of innovation in business contributes to enhancing its agility in the face of potential market shifts and emerging consumer needs. The clubbing of both innovation and entrepreneurial parameters in business contributes to evaluating the objectives that are needed to be met for generating customer satisfaction. This is carried out either based on the development of new product offerings or modifying the existing ones based on consumer needs.
In addition to meeting the objectives of product-market fit incorporation of an innovative mindset in business also helps in augmenting the retention rates of employees within the firm. A report published by Microsoft reflects that around 86 percent of the employees that operate in innovative and creative firms plan to sustain their jobs as compared to the 57 percent retention rate in less innovative firms.
Innovation in business earns effective association of adding something new into or with the existing business dimensions. The same can be of enhancing or replacing the existing business processes for increasing needed efficiency and business productivity. Again, innovation can be generated in business in terms of adding products or services to the existing portfolio of products or services offerings rendered by the firm. The application of innovation can also be made by the business institutions for the production of novel products and services based on changing consumer needs. Innovation is also brought about by the firms in terms of augmenting the value to the existing products and services for effectively differentiating such from the offerings rendered by competitors. Thus, in whatever form innovation is pursued by an organization it ends up involving needed creativity.
The significance of innovation from the business viewpoint is also understood in regards to the benefits generated by it to the firm. The same are outlined as follows:
- It helps in increasing business productivity and in reducing costs
- It helps in augmenting the perceived value of the brand and in enhancing the level of competitiveness of the firm in the concerned market
- It contributes to the development of new partnerships and strategic business relationships
- It contributes to enhancing the level of turnover for the business and thus helps in driving needed profitability in the long run
Relationship between Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Innovation is considered to be an effective tool that is employed by entrepreneurs for bringing about business development. In the current age of globalization, the place of creativity and innovation in entrepreneurship is increasingly recognized on a global scale. The merging of both entrepreneurs and innovators has contributed to the emergence of Innovative Entrepreneurs. The set of innovative entrepreneurs is observed to challenge the existence of different assumptions. Further, the innovative entrepreneurs are also observed to possess a unique power identified as ‘Creative Intelligence’. This power though helps in enabling various types of discoveries yet tends to differ from other categories of intelligence.
Some examples of innovative entrepreneurs are Ray Kroc, Henry Ford, and Sam Walton. These entrepreneurs were observed to be innovative in nature in that they focused on differentiating their product offerings from those developed by the competitors. The differentiation of the product offerings is generated based on the powers of creativity and innovation. Other types of innovative entrepreneurs are like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates that contributed to the development of technological applications like the Graphical User Interface (GUI) and Disk Operating System (DOS) respectively. In terms of being innovative entrepreneurs, they focused on bringing about innovative product or service offerings based on eyeing emerging market opportunities and consumer needs.
Research carried out in the field of innovation and entrepreneurship ideally reflects that both of them are closely interrelated phenomena. The generation of an innovative product or service offering requires the presence of an entrepreneurial attitude. In terms of innovation, ideas are focused on being created by researchers, inventors, and other visionary scientists. The ideas thus generated are identified by the entrepreneurial mind. The merging of the entrepreneurship mindset with innovative ideas contributes to generating a commercial breakthrough and thus expanding the adaptability of such on a global scale.
Views about B-Schools on Role of Innovation in Entrepreneurship
The Case of Harvard Business School (HBS)
The HBS Community earns credit for encouraging and inspiring its students for accomplishing their entrepreneurial dreams. Further, HBS earns strength in terms of possessing a large plethora of resources that help in supporting the emerging needs of innovators in a seamless manner within a classroom setting. While the Rock Centre for Entrepreneurship, in HBS, caters to supporting the entrepreneurial ambition of students based on the generation of different programs the Harvard i-lab contributes to allocating and streamlining diverse resources for the steady accomplishment of entrepreneurial dreams powered by innovation. Again, different types of entrepreneurial courses are also dealt with in the school for honing the entrepreneurial acumen of the students.
The Case of Globsyn Business School (GBS)
Globsyn Business School (GBS) located in Kolkata is one such B-School that focuses on developing budding entrepreneurs. Over the last two decades, GBS has uniquely positioned itself as India’s only ‘Corporate B-School’. The edifice of GBS is essentially built upon three pillars viz. Innovation, Research, and Technology. Further, the aspects of Innovation and Creativity are present as the Core Values of the B-School.
The B-School has always motivated students to use their theoretical knowledge, thoughts, and imagination in formulating feasible business plans during their course of study. ‘Embryon – the Entrepreneurship Cell of GBS’, incubates these ideas and provides students the platforms to showcase their business plans to an independent expert panel comprising of industry veterans, whose inputs help shape the ideas into successful ventures. Recently ‘Embryon – the Entrepreneurship Cell of GBS’ has been recognized among 24 business schools, globally, as an AACSB International 2021 Innovation That Inspires. This annual program recognizes institutions from around the world that serve as champions of change in the business education landscape.
Innovation serves as a potential catalyst for successful entrepreneurship in that it helps the firms in retaining employees and also in generating increased financial gains. Over the decades, the B-Schools all around the globe have started recognizing the role played by creativity and innovation in entrepreneurship in terms of generating market-responsive courses and programs.