THE RELEVANCE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING OR EDUCATION IN OUR SOCIETY

ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING

INTRODUCTION

The entrepreneur is commonly seen as an innovator — a generator of new ideas and business processes. Management skill and strong team building abilities are often perceived as essential leadership attributes for successful entrepreneurs. Political economist Robert Reichconsiders leadership, management ability, and team-buildingto be essential qualities of an entrepreneur.

Entrepreneurship is a key driver of our economy. Wealth and a high majority of jobs are created by small businesses started by entrepreneurially minded individuals, many of whom go on to create big businesses.

Entrepreneurship education helps student acquire skills and experiences that will enable them to develop the insight needed to discover and create entrepreneurial opportunities; and the expertise to successfully start and manage their own businesses to take advantage of these opportunities.

Entrepreneurship education is a lifelong learning process, starting as early as elementary school and progressing through all levels of education, including adult education. The Standards and their supporting Performance Indicators are a framework for teachers to use in building appropriate objectives, learning activities, and assessments for their target audience.

 

DEFINITION OF ENTREPRENEUR

‘Entrepreneur’ is an individual who, rather than working as an employee, runs a small business and assumes all the risk and reward of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes. (www.investopedia.com /terms/e /entrepreneur.asp)

 

The term entrepreneur defined as a person who pays a certain price for a product and resells  it at an uncertain price (Cantillon 1982): “making decisions about obtaining and using the resources while consequently admitting the risk of enterprise.”

An entrepreneur is someone who exercises initiative by organizing a venture to take benefit of an opportunity and, as the decision maker, decides what, how, and how much of a good or service will be produced. (http://www.businessdictionary. com/definition/ entrepreneur.html).

Successful entrepreneurs have the ability to lead a business in a positive direction by proper planning, to adapt to changing environments and understand their own strengths and weakness.

 

What is an entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship is the process of starting a business, a startup company or other organization. The entrepreneur develops a business plan, acquires the human and other required resources, and is fully responsible for its success or failure. Entrepreneurship operates within an entrepreneurship ecosystem.

Entrepreneurship is the capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture with any of the its risks in order to make profit.

 

Theorists Frank Knight and Peter Drucker defined entrepreneurship in terms of risk-taking. The entrepreneur is willing to put his or her career and financial security on the line and take risks in the name of an idea, spending time as well as capital on an uncertain venture. Knight classified three types of uncertainty:

• Risk, which is measurable statistically (such as the probability of drawing a red color ball from a jar containing 5 red balls and 5 white balls).
• Ambiguity, which is hard to measure statistically (such as the probability of drawing a red ball from a jar containing 5 red balls but with an unknown number of white balls).
• True uncertainty or Knightian uncertainty, which is impossible to estimate or predict statistically, such as the probability of drawing a red ball from a jar whose number of red balls is unknown as well as the number of other colored balls.

Entrepreneurship is often associated with true uncertainty, particularly when it involves something truly novel, such as a market that did not previously exist.

 

RELEVANCE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING

Entrepreneurship education is a lifelong learning process, starting as early as elementary school and progressing through all levels of education, including adult education. The Standards and their supporting Performance Indicators are a framework for teachers to use in building appropriate objectives, learning activities, and assessments for their target audience. Using this framework, students will have: progressively more challenging educational activities; experiences that will enable them to develop the insight needed to discover and create entrepreneurial opportunities; and the expertise to successfully start and manage their own businesses to take advantage of these opportunities.

 

The importance of entrepreneurship training in the new economy also goes beyond empowering people wishing to start their own businesses. Entrepreneurship education has become critical important to people who want to follow the so-called professional routes, like becoming doctors, lawyers, accountants and engineers. The financially successful professionals in the new economy will have to be entrepreneurs as well.

 

Entrepreneurship education has a positive impact on the entrepreneurial mindset of young people, their intentions towards entrepreneurship, their employability and finally on their role in society and the economy.

 

The key role of entrepreneurship education must not be disregarded. In addition to equipping young people with the skills needed for the 21st century, entrepreneurship education is a means to increase social inclusion; it can increase the number of entrepreneurs – social and commercial, and it can be a gateway for a greater integration of the framework for key competences for lifelong learning.

 

Entrepreneurship education seeks to prepare people to be responsible, enterprising individuals who have the attitudes, skills and knowledge necessary to achieve the goals they set for themselves to live a fulfilled life.

BENEFITS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP TRAINING

Benefits to Secondary School Students

• Creation of entrepreneurial thinkers who also have the skills and tools to start their own businesses.
• Write a business plan
• Apply economic principles
• Determine individual entrepreneurial interests
• Apply basic marketing skills
• Use strategies for idea generation
• Assess feasibility of ideas
• Manage risk
• Identify legitimate sources of capital
• Evaluate ownership structures
• Translate problems into opportunities
• Apply principles of human relations management
• Speak “business” & “entrepreneurship”
• Apply basic accounting principles
• Engage in ethical business practices
• Demonstrate financial management

Benefits to Post-Secondary and Adult Students

• Demonstrate skills in business startup
• Demonstrate skills in maintaining business longevity
• Demonstrate knowledge of business closings versus failure
• Ability to find next level of training or access other resources and services
• Demonstrate business management/ operation skills
• Use components of a business plan
• Determine impact on unemployment
• Changed attitude toward entrepreneurship as a means of making a living
• Changes in personal and career attitudes including
  • Self-worth
  • Ability to control one’s own life
  • Self awareness
  • Self management/ personality responsibility
  • Transfer of learning
  • Motivation
  • Teamwork
  • Interpersonal communications
  • Problem solving
  • Creativity

How the knowledge of entrepreneur can lead to productivity  

Entrepreneurship knowledge acquired through entrepreneurial education has its attending benefits which helps in creating jobs and establishment of more business firms in the economy.

 

Entrepreneurial sector is a large and growing component of many economies, enhancing its performance will generate significant gains for the nation as a whole. Whether the business owner employs two or a hundred employees, it is helpful that he or she frequently measures and focuses on the resources that keep the business continually growing.

Entrepreneur knowledge and activities of entrepreneur lead to productivity in the following ways 

1.     Entrepreneurs boost economic growth by introducing innovative technologies, products, and services.

2.     Increased competition from entrepreneurs challenges existing firms to become more competitive.

3.     Entrepreneurs provide new job opportunities in the short and long term.

4.     Entrepreneurial activity raises the productivity of firms and economies.

5.   Entrepreneurs accelerate structural change by replacing established, sclerotic firms.

CONCLUSION

As it can be seen, Entrepreneurship education can positively impact a learner at all levels in a wide number of contexts. This may explain why there are such a wide variety of entrepreneurship education programs, all of which can provide important outcomes at various stages of a learner’s life. As supporters of entrepreneurship education the Consortium for Entrepreneurship Education applauds the great diversity of programs that fall under the framework of the National Standards for Entrepreneurship Education.

 

Entrepreneurship education should not be confused with general business and economic studies, as its goal is to promote creativity, innovation and self-employment.

 

Entrepreneurial programmes offer students the tools to think creatively, to be an effective problem solver, and to communicate, to network and to lead. Entrepreneurship is not necessarily a topic – it is also a different way of teaching and of helping young people to fully develop their potential.

The intended goals of entrepreneurship education and intervention logic are further elaborated in the 2010 Commission’s report ‘Towards greater cooperation in coherence in entrepreneurship education’.1 Teaching and learning entrepreneurial

 

REFERENCES

Hisrich, Robert D. (2011). Entrepreneurship. McGraw-Hill Education. ISBN 978-0-07062-017-9.

Shane, Scott Andrew (2000). A General Theory of Entrepreneurship: The Individual-opportunity Nexus. Edward Elgar Publishing. ISBN 978-1-78100-799-0.

Paul D. Reynolds (30 September 2007). Entrepreneurship in the United States: The Future Is Now. Springer. ISBN 978-0-387-45671-3.

Akeredolu – Alc, E.O (1975). The Underdevelopment of indigenous entrepreneurs in Nigeria. Ibadan: University Press.

 

Ownumere, J. (2000). The Nature and relevance of SMEs in Economic Development. The Nigerian Banker Journal of the Chartered Intituted of Bankers of Nigeria Vol. 25

Onuoha B.C. (1998) Small Business Management / entrepreneurship, Aba, Afri-tower ltd.

Onuoha B.C. (1994) Entrepreneurial Development in Nigeria, Okigwe, Van Global Publication.

Valliere, D., and R. Peterson. “Entrepreneurship and economic growth: Evidence from emerging and developed countries.” Entrepreneurship & Regional Development 21:5–6 (2009): 459–480.