A Study of Enablers of Successful Entrepreneurs: A Journey from Start-up to Scale-up

Abstract

Entrepreneurs play a significant role in development of an economy. They mobilize resources, produce, facilitate consumption, and generate factor income by creating jobs. The various programs launched by the Indian government have provided a boost to the startups. Despite the facilities provided by Indian government to promote the startups, only starting up is not enough. The bigger challenge lies in scaling up as the scaled up business would not only generate revenues to the economy but help in self-reliance and accelerate the pace of growth and development. Thus, it becomes imperative to understand the success factors of entrepreneurs so that it helps in scaling up the enterprises. The study aims at identifying the enablers of the entrepreneurial success which helped the entrepreneurs in scaling up. It also aims at studying the relationship of identified enablers of entrepreneurial success and scaling up of business. Further, it helps in making recommendations for training and educating future entrepreneurs. The study is descriptive in nature and the sampling technique is Purposive. The sample consists of 70 successful entrepreneurs where the researchers have identified the parameters of success as financial success, growth and social success (employment generation etc.). The entrepreneurs are from Agra and Delhi, NCR. The study uses both primary and secondary data. The primary data has been collected through structured questionnaire which consists of 64 items. The data has been analyzed using multiple regression analysis. Along with this, content analysis has also been used to analyze the qualitative data collected through unstructured interview and literature review. The results of the quantitative data indicate significant relationship between convergent thinking and entrepreneurial success but divergent thinking is not significantly contributing to entrepreneurial success. Similarly, risk propensity is also significantly related to scaling up and entrepreneurial success. There are other factors contributing to entrepreneurial success which have been further explored with the help of qualitative data using content analysis. In the highly competitive market, creativity is needed by entrepreneurs to continuously innovate and get the competitive advantage in the market. Thus, creativity is needed to scale up and expand business. Convergent thinking has been found to be positively related to entrepreneurial success which means that entrepreneurs use creativity to determine the single best solution to a problem. The qualitative data suggests that creativity significantly contributes to entrepreneurial and managerial success. The findings of the research work will serve as a guideline to design appropriate contents for entrepreneurship and management education as there is lot of emphasis on entrepreneurship education, vocational courses and skill building training programs in the current policies of government of India. In addition to this, it will also help the future entrepreneurs in scaling up their business and achieve success with the help of the identified enablers.