As unemployment and poverty issues are becoming major concerns the world over, many countries including India have launched ‘training’ programmes under its vocational education strategies to ‘develop entrepreneurs’. Unfortunately, the concerns have gotten a bit mixed and messed up by including poverty alleviation as one of the core objectives of these interventions. Nothing wrong with this except that the focus on developing entrepreneurs has now been zeroed among the poorest of the poor. It is not my argument that entrepreneurial qualities are not found among the poorer strata of society. My argument is that while there have been many training programs for developing ‘entrepreneurship’ not much effort has gone into the question of how we can identify candidates who have true entrepreneurial qualities. Not everyone can become an entrepreneur. Likewise, a person with an entrepreneurial mindset can never work as an employee. The personality make-up of a wage earner and an entrepreneur are two completely different categories. Unfortunately, this very important aspect has been completely ignored by the policymakers.
Who is an entrepreneur?
While research review indicates a number of traits a successful entrepreneur, must possess in order to build a successful enterprise what comes out very clearly are a few factors like having an uncanny ability to identify opportunities, take calculated risks, a high degree of need to excel, skills of seamlessly forming a network of contacts, belief in his/her own efforts and desire to put in hard work. Those who consciously choose entrepreneurship as a career choice do so because of the economic freedom and psychological rewards. In this sense, he is not an exploiter of resources but he creates wealth for him and the society. It must be pointed out here that while a lot of research has taken place to understand the underpinnings of urban entrepreneurship very little research has been undertaken to study the dynamics of rural entrepreneurship. To us this is significant because the motivations for setting up a business in rural and urban settings could be different. While in the urban areas, businesses are started due to the easy availability of resources in the rural areas businesses may be started out of economic compulsions.
The research review indicates that it is possible to generalize a few common traits across different cultures and settings. The research findings indicate a direct correlation between the need for achievement, locus of control and risk-taking propensity with success in the enterprise. Again, the entrepreneurial characteristics to start a business successfully are not the same as required during its growth stage or even when the business has grown significantly. The role of the entrepreneur changes during the formation, growth and peak stages. In this sense, it is contextual.
Ideally, the psychometric tools for the purpose of selecting the entrepreneurs are to be used in the early stages of starting the business.
The research on entrepreneurship suggests that the following traits are essential for starting any enterprise.
- Emotional Stability
- Openness to new ideas and creative bent of mind
- Extraversion
- Conscientiousness
- Self -discipline
- Achievement Orientation
The argument here is that very little effort has been put in by the training providers to first identify these traits through the use of psychometric tools and screen the candidates. Unless this is done we are in real danger of losing out the potentially good candidate who has a better chance of making his/her enterprise a success. The training providers just mechanically expose everyone into standard topics like life skills, financial inclusion etc. At the end of the training, nothing concrete emerges. Proper psychometric profiling to be followed with customized training and ensuring the forward and backward linkages is the only way of mentoring entrepreneurs. Hope our vocational training experts and the ministries responsible for the program look into them a bit more carefully.
