Q.Who is an entrepreneur?

AP Inter II year Commerce opens the entrepreneurship unit with a precise idea of who an entrepreneur actually is, rather than the loose everyday sense of the word.

An entrepreneur is a person who conceives a business idea, mobilises the land, labour, and capital needed to give it shape, bears the uncertainty of the outcome personally, and directs the enterprise towards its objectives.

Three ideas run through this meaning: innovation (doing something new, or an existing thing in a new way), risk-bearing (committing resources to an outcome that is never certain, and absorbing the loss if the venture fails), and organisation-building (actually assembling resources into a working enterprise, not merely holding an idea).

Students sometimes define an entrepreneur simply as "a businessman," which misses the specific elements of innovation and personal risk-bearing that the BIEAP commerce syllabus expects to be named explicitly.