Innovation being Essential yet not Sufficient for Successful Entrepreneurship

Abstract

Innovation as Rama Bijapurkar puts it "is about new and unusual ways of thinking which, when implemented, can help improve the outcomes of actions, resulting in greater financial and/or social value." Entrepreneurship is defined as the "Capacity and willingness to undertake conception, organization, and management of a productive venture with all attendant risks, while seeking profit as a reward." Bringing Innovation and Entrepreneurship together, Peter F. Drucker in his book Innovation and Entrepreneurs says that "Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service" Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation." Today's entrepreneurship is stereotypic and innovators, grown at global levels as global leaders alone play a significant role and no local or regional start-up players are into such type of innovations, as innovation is all about creativity and appropriateness in generating value added ideas or processes in their respective enterprise without deteriorating the quality and originality. In this paper the authors argue that Innovation is the foundation for successful entrepreneurship and it is very much indispensable yet, innovation alone is not sufficient for successful entrepreneurship. According to the authors' successful entrepreneurship is that which have a larger impact based on innovation, and can help entrepreneurs towards transformation of businesses, societies and countries thereby emancipating their contribution to global economies. Although, there are lots of vibrant innovative enterprises, the present study have taken ten cases of successful entrepreneurs selectively within India in support their argument. The cases comprise of success stories of Nano, Apollo group, Amul, Nirma, Reliance Industries, DLF, Dr.Reddy's, Airtel, Godrej and Wipro. These cases are revived and presented in this paper to strengthen the thematic framework of the paper. In these cases the authors tend to synchronize the innovation of entrepreneurs along with their respective enterprises wherein their innovation catered towards pre-requisites of entrepreneurs viz. need for vision, determination, suitable political, economic and technological environment, low cost strategy, risk taking ability and soft skill for successful entrepreneurship.