C O N C E P T U A L I Z AT I O N AND LEARNINGS

Entrepreneurship and Innovation: How Leadership Style Makes the Difference ?
Satyabir Bhattacharyya

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n entrepreneur is often defined as one who starts his own, new, and small business. But, not every new small business is entrepreneurial or represents entrepreneurship. For instance, the husband-and-wife team which opens another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely takes a risk. But, are they entrepreneurs? What they do has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area but create neither a new concept of customer satisfaction nor a new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective, they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture.

WHAT IS ENTREPRENEURSHIP?
The setting up of McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. McDonald’s did not invent anything new; its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But, by applying management concepts and techniques (for instance, by asking what is ‘value’ to the customer), standardizing the ‘product’ across all locations and countries, designing processes and tools, and streamlining training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources and created a new market and a new customer base. This is entrepreneurship. Equally entrepreneurial was the growing foundry started more than 20 years ago by a husband-and-wife team in America’s Midwest to heat-treat ferrous castings to high performance specifications — for example, the axles for the huge bulldozers used to clear the land and dig the ditches for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska. The company did not do anything that had not been done before. But, in the first place, the founders systematized the