Meaning of Entrepreneurial Competency

1. Meaning of Entrepreneurial Competency

What a competency is. In ordinary language a competency is the ability to do a job well. More precisely, a competency is an underlying characteristic of a person that leads to effective or superior performance in a task or role. A competency is not any single thing but a combination of several ingredients working together:

• Knowledge — the information a person has (for example, knowledge of a product, a market, or the sources of finance);
• Skill — the ability to actually do something (for example, the skill of persuading a customer or of planning a production schedule);
• Motive — the inner drive that makes a person want to do something (for example, the wish to achieve, or the wish to excel);
• Traits and self-image — stable personal qualities and the picture a person has of themselves (for example, self-confidence, or seeing oneself as a problem-solver);
• Attitude — the settled way a person tends to respond to situations (for example, a positive, opportunity-seeking outlook).

When all of these combine and are put into action, they show up as observable behaviour that produces results — and it is this behaviour that we can actually see, measure and, most importantly, improve.

Meaning of entrepreneurial competency. An entrepreneurial competency, therefore, is an underlying characteristic of a person — a blend of knowledge, skill, motive, trait, self-image and attitude — that results in the successful setting-up and running of an enterprise. In simple words, entrepreneurial competencies are the set of qualities and abilities that enable a person to identify a business opportunity, organise the necessary resources, take the risk of starting a venture, and run it profitably. They are what actually distinguish a successful entrepreneur from an unsuccessful one.

The most important point about entrepreneurial competencies. The single most important idea in this whole chapter is that entrepreneurial competencies are not inborn gifts that only a few lucky people possess. Research — most famously the work carried out for the study of achievement motivation — has established that these competencies can be identified, taught and developed in ordinary people through suitable education, training and practice. This is precisely why entrepreneurship development programmes (studied later in this chapter) are worth running at all: if competencies could not be developed, no amount of training would help. …