Who is an Entrepreneur

​As my fellow bloggers have mentioned, it’s been an intense week that’s already felt like a month at IMD……we have covered everything from marketing in the health care sector, product segmentation, corporate bonds, balance sheets, valuating companies, career services and of course, one of the most anticipated sessions – Entrepreneurship with Professor Benoit and the famous start up projects.

As Benoit puts it one of the goals for this session is to help us understand Entrepreneurs and their world better…how do we do this – by working with 15 start ups to help them evolve their business to the next stage. We met our entrepreneurs over the weekend and many of us made distant trips to visit their offices in an effort to better understand their businesses.

Most of us tend to believe that the average entrepreneur is some sort of dare devil who thrives on risk. My moment of discovery during the class was when we were told that statistics show that Entrepreneurs are actually risk averse and take great cautionary measures to mitigate risks. I am still trying to digest, reflect and perhaps come to terms with this reality check!

So who are these brave people – After spending some time with our entrepreneur over the weekend, I realized that you don’t have to be born an entrepreneur or have an entrepreneurial background...What really keeps these individuals going is their drive, passion and belief in their ideas and their quest to translate their ideas to reality. Nothing matters to them more than the fruition of their ideas and the success of their “babies”. I asked our entrepreneur how he was able to leave his well-paid, successful career at a large multi-national to venture into entrepreneurship and his response was that he was tired of living someone else’s life, someone else’s dream and wanted to live his own life and try what really mattered to him. And even if none of his ventures eventually succeed, he would look back happy and satisfied that he had lived his life on his terms!

I’ve spent most of the weekend trying to digest this entrepreneurial spirit…I don’t know if I ever will venture out in that direction post IMD but I do know that the next 10 weeks will give me a close and deep look into the life of an Entrepreneur and help me debunk the many myths of this mysterious creature, “The Entrepreneur”