Entrepreneurship and Innovation certainly have correlation and it is more so in small and medium enterprises. Every entrepreneur will have to be an innovator to be successful but the reverse is not true as an innovator need not be a good entrepreneur.
The significance of this profound message is that the entrepreneurs become successful only when they keep on innovating to tackle emerging problems.
For example a small hotel owner had frequent complaints from his customers that the tap is not working in his room or the TV is not working and so on. So what he did was he always kept few rooms vacant. Whenever he got such complaints, he used to change the customer to one of the vacant rooms he had. As a result customer was satisfied because he felt his problem was immediately attended to.
This may be a simple solution to win over customers, who felt satisfied and their grievances have been attended to even if the actual problem still remained and needed more time and money to be solved in course of time. Innovation need not always be inventing something but just some out of the box thinking that promotes once business by finding solution to an immediate problem.
This is perhaps one thing that needed to be inculcated among small entrepreneurs to make them successful.
MSME Secretary Anup Pujari was right when he told a CII conclave here that this quality was critical for development of entrepreneurship among small and medium enterprises. Those who have succeeded have this quality, which comes automatically to them.
To encourage this out of the box thinking, Pujari felt that three things are essential. He said creation of wealth should be seen as desirable and the mindset in the country that money-making considered as bad, should go.
Secondly failure in a business should not be looked down upon and that it should be tolerated if not celebrated. In India generally there is a tendency to attach a stigma to a person who fails in business, more so in small business, especially in rural areas, Pujari said.
For every success there will be half a dozen failures, which is very natural. In fact one draws lesson from failures. instead upon So instead of frowning upon the person, one should help him to come out of it and hand-hold him to succeed in his next endeavour.
Third most important thing, Pujari said is to recognize middlemen, particularly in small business which did not have wherewithal to do everything by itself. Middlemen do provide service and that needed to be recognized and taken advantage of to promote business.
These ideas are not any policy pronouncements but certainly useful tips for small entrepreneurs, who are young and want to be self employed to convert their dreams into a reality.
By – K.R. Sudhaman
Image Courtesy : Switch-Asia
