Personal Evaluation of Entrepreneurial Characteristics
Introduction

The purpose of this report is to give a wide overview about the aspects of the entrepreneur and examine the student’s characteristics in this respect. This will be achieved by presenting three strengths and three weaknesses of the student relating with them theories that have been developed by scholars over the years.
The Table 1 below is a summary of some contributions that have been made by economists, sociologists, political scientists etc. in their effort to define the entrepreneurial personality. However there is not a term that has been universally accepted yet. Joseph Schumpeter was the first scientist that made contributions trying to examine the entrepreneurial character. He argued, “It is in most cases only one man or a few men who see the new possibility and are able to cope with the resistance and difficulties which action always meets with outside of the ruts of established practice” (Joseph A. Schumpeter, 1947).

Table 1: Definitions of Entrepreneur (Journal of Entrepreneurship, 2000)

1. Strengths
1.1 Risk Taker

Scientists have given a lot of emphasis on the characteristic of risk bearing with respect to the entrepreneurs. Noah Webster in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1961) refers to the entrepreneur as “the organizer of an economic venture, especially one who organizes, owns, manages and assumes the risk of a business”. On the other hand, Schumpeter (1934) argued that risk bearing is a characteristic more common in the concept of ownership and since entrepreneurs are not necessarily owners of a venture it cannot be considered as an absolute entrepreneurial trait.
To conclude, although Schumpeter’s differentiation of ownership and entrepreneurship is well defined, examining an entrepreneur’s activities we could assume that the risk-bearing propensity