Page 118 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

What Makes a Successful Entrepreneur? 107

environment in determining entrepreneurial success by holding that innate
traits of entrepreneurs permit them to act on the opportunities and chal-
lenges presented by the context in which they operate (Pendergast 2006). If
no innate characteristics, consistently attributable to entrepreneurs, have
been proven to exist, however, there must be another explanation.
The unsuccessful search for the special entrepreneurial personality profile
has led to attempts to find other explanations. Researchers in this field have
been looking for something more tangible to study, which has resulted in a
behavioral perspective on entrepreneurship. Instead of searching for the en-
trepreneur’s traits (Low and MacMillan 1988), the behavioral perspective
turns to studying entrepreneurial behaviors. Gartner (1989) called on re-
searchers to move their attention into the arena of entrepreneurial behavior
because the personality characteristics of entrepreneurs are secondary to
their behavior.
While the individual entrepreneur was the focus of analysis in the per-
sonality perspective, the behavioral perspective views entrepreneurs
through the roles, functions, and activities in which they engage in the
process of finding business opportunities and creating new ventures. Thus,
the focal point of the behavioral perspective is the process of organization
creation. According to Carter, Gartner, and Reynolds (1996), the creation of
an organization involves several activities, and the focus of entrepreneurial
research should be on studying what these activities are, how many of them
have to be accomplished in the business start-up period, and when these ac-
tivities start and end.
Some of the studies within this behavioral tradition propose that there is
a special order to different entrepreneurial activities: discovering a problem,
developing a solution, accumulating resources, marketing products, creat-
ing an organization, producing, and selling. These activities represent mile-
stones in a process (Block and MacMillan 1985). During the entrepreneur-
ial process, entrepreneurs experiment with different hypotheses about
products, markets, and competition and test them through experience.
Carter et al. (1996) compared three groups of entrepreneurs—(1) entre-
preneurs who started a business, (2) entrepreneurs who gave up on starting
a business, and (3) entrepreneurs who are still trying—and then identified
different profiles of activities undertaken by each group.
The entrepreneurs who started a business were more aggressive and ac-
tive. They quickly engaged in “tangible” activities such as buying equipment
and facilities, taking a loan, and generating sales. The entrepreneurs who
gave up a business start-up found that their business ideas were not suc-
cessful, and as a result, ceased their activities. Interestingly, this group un-
dertook mostly the same activities as the successful group.
The “still trying” entrepreneurs had undertaken fewer activities that make
business real to others, like buying equipment and setting up operations,