Entrepreneurship in Sri Lanka
Oxford Dictionaries (n.d.) describe Entrepreneurship as the activity of making money by starting or running businesses, especially when this involves taking financial risks; the ability to do this is pronounced as entrepreneurship. Anyone who learned business management at any stage of their lives surely has come across this word ‘entrepreneurship’ and most of you might have heard hours of lectures about how the entrepreneurs change the world as we know it. The existence of the business world is due to the successful entrepreneurs who took the risk and made it and the unsuccessful entrepreneurs who took the risk and failed allowing others to learn from their mistakes.
Let’s identify a few commonly known qualities of an entrepreneur.
1. Resolute motivation and passion: No one can achieve anything if they do not have a passion for reaching that goal. As a result of this absolute passion, motivation starts to create in an entrepreneur’s mind as he takes on new tasks and learns new things in order to reach that goal. Motivation keeps the blood running, helping an entrepreneur to keep hope and overcome obstacles as he or she advances towards the goal.
2. Self-discipline: This basically means to master the inner self and inner emotions to generate a sense of responsibility for getting the job done, which fosters self-direction.
3. Risk-taking ability: Entrepreneurship is all about taking risks. Entrepreneurs have the ability to take greater risks to achieve greater success, but not all risk-takers are successful entrepreneurs.
4. Creative thinking: A successful entrepreneur is a creative thinker with loads of ideas constantly flowing through her mind. This drastic ability to think of a wide range of new ideas helps an entrepreneur to initiate different types of business in a unique, creative way.
5. Persistence: Persistence is the most basic and essential quality of a successful entrepreneur because even good entrepreneurs experience failures and hurdles. But with persistence, you’re able to pick yourself back up and keep moving towards your goals. (sixvertical.com, 2018)
Business is an art, and not everyone knows to master this art. Some people have the inborn qualities to be a successful entrepreneur, and others work to develop these qualities. No matter which of these descriptions best fits you, everyone can benefit from continuing to improve on these important characteristics.
Why there are less successful entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka?
Though Sri Lanka is categorized as a middle-income country in recent world bank publications (2018), it was categorized as a developing country for the last few decades. This economic situation unveils many socio-economic problems for upcoming entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka than for the entrepreneurs in developed countries. The room for trial and error is very marginal in these economies thus a Sri Lankan will always hesitate to take a risk and work on his/her idea instead, they tend to pursue a career that will ensure short term benefits, mainly financial.
Also, the far from behind support receiving from the government and other financial institutes for entrepreneurs is another key disadvantage in Sri Lanka. As per the National Intellectual Property Office in Sri Lanka (n.d), there are more international patents request than local patent request over the past few years.
Though the number of applicants has increased during the last couple of years, registrations are still behind the international applicants.
In this technological era, entrepreneurs and inventors has changed the world drastically and as a country we’re very much behind and encouraging more entrepreneurs to emerge will help create the businesses that Sri Lanka needs to boost the economy.
Today, organizations have identified the importance of entrepreneurship and has adopted entrepreneurship as a function. Let’s discuss about it in another article.
References:
Oxford Dictionaries. (n.d) entrepreneurship. [Online] Available from: https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/entrepreneurship?q=entrepreneurship. [Accessed 21st December 2019].
sixvertical.com. (2018) Business Leadership. [Online] Available from: https://www.sixvertical.com/insights-blog-default/top-5-qualities-of-a-successful-entrepreneur. [Accessed 21st December 2019].
worldbank.org. (2018) The World Bank In Sri Lanka. [Online] Available from: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/srilanka/overview. [Accessed December 2019].
National Intellectual Property Office in Sri Lanka. (2019) Statistics. [Online] Available from: https://www.nipo.gov.lk/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=8&Itemid=130&lang=en. [Accessed 21st December 2019].
Entrepreneurship is important as it has the ability to improve standards of living and create wealth, not only for the entrepreneurs, but also for related businesses. Entrepreneurs also help drive change with innovation, where new and improved products enable new markets to be developed.
ReplyDeleteIndeed the lack of entrepreneurs in our country is a major setback when comparing to the global countries. The younger entrepreneurs in our country could be our key to finally break the curse of we being a developing country for decades.
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ReplyDeleteInteresting topic to discuss in theses day since the GDP of our economy is at slower levels. Entrepreneurs can change this with the support of other facts very easily.
ReplyDeleteWith this fast-changing world, a single idea can overturn an industry overnight. New segment of businesses can grow faster than ever and boost the volums. Entrepreneurs also becoming increasingly important to the global economy.
When entrepreneurs are able to innovate like this, they drive economic growth and create jobs at an even faster rate.
Entrepreneurship is a key driver for any economy. Sri Lanka has an exceptionally low nearness of businesspeople in the market numbering under 1.5% of the populace. This contrasted with a portion of different nations in the Asian countries, for example, Vietnam and Thailand are low.
ReplyDeleteIn the event that Sri Lanka is to push ahead with a fare driven improvement plan, develop the economy and contend at a worldwide scale then we unquestionably need to concentrate on empowering business enterprise. Truth be told creating business enterprises ought to be a national need at a strategy level. The business enterprise biological system in the nation has seen promising advancements during the most recent couple of years specifically. There is a lot of buzzes now on the theme, particularly inside the youth section.
Is it entrepreneur are born or made?
ReplyDeleteYou got the point.
ReplyDeleteSri Lanka has less Number of entrepreneurs. Therefor Sri Lanka needs to make entrepreneurship a viable career for the majority.Since there are successful entrepreneurs in Sri lanka like Mr.Dulith Herath, Founder Chairman of Kapruka.com - Retail Industry, Ananda Caldera, Executive Director of Global Rubber Industries Pvt Ltd - Manufacturing Industry etc The government needs to more focus on this area.
ReplyDeleteEntrepreneurs has its own identity when they are dealing with other business entrepreneurs. They have creativeness, communication, assertiveness between organisation & employers to make a contact between consumers.
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