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Development in any area of life has always depended to some degree on individual qualities of entrepreneurship. Small enterprises are usually initiated, managed and developed by one or few individuals. The qualities of entrepreneurship thus constitute one of the major resources in the promotion of small enterprises.
The individual thus constitutes the most important element in entrepreneurship. It is the individual entrepreneur who takes the decision to start or not to start an enterprise and also works hard to make it successful. Since an entrepreneur can be developed there are certain set of qualities in the individual that contribute to entrepreneurship. Women entrepreneurs, in particular have to recognize their own qualities and identify the factors that help them to develop into successful entrepreneurs. Project identification thus needs to be based on environmental opportunities and threats, and personal strengths and weaknesses of the entrepreneur. There should be a perfect match between the project needs and the individual. Women have a certain role in the society; they are perceived as being afraid of achievement, poor at quantitative analysis, unable to take tough decisions etc; emotionally unstable and irritable. Hence a SWOT analysis has to be undertaken to understand the qualities –
S ------ Strengths
W ------ Weaknesses
O------- Opportunities
T ------- Threats
To innovate, an entrepreneur has to make a diagnosis of the current situation. The diagnosis of the current situation is done by conducting an Internal Analysis and External Analysis.
Analysis of External and Internal Environment together is called SWOT analysis. SWOT Analysis refers to identifying the strength, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of an organization.
SWOT Analysis is a tool, often used by organizations in planning its future. This tool can be external in a simplified manner as follows:
S – Strengths ------------of the organization
W – Weakness
O – Opportunities--------of the environment
T – Threats
The Internal Analysis of the organization will cover the organizational position with respect to different functional areas like production, finance, marketing, R & D and so on. More specifically, this may look into a company’s sales volume, market share, profitability and so on. This will reveal its strength and weakness.
The External Analysis will do the necessary scanning of the business environment to identify any threat and opportunities posed on the company, its products or services. More specifically, this will include the industry performance, competitive activity and a review of the growth and decline of the user industries.
Of the entrepreneurs, since starting an enterprise is not a simple matter and running it successfully requires many qualities and characteristics.
In the beginning, a venture requires skills like drive, initiative, resource mobilization, mobility and quick decision making which are very difficult to develop and are different from skills required later on like persistence, business ethics, stamina, goal setting.
The entrepreneur may not possess all the skills, some may be present while some may be lacking. Some qualities that an entrepreneur possesses may be very strong and which are the key factors for the starting of a unit and are termed as strength and those that are holding back the entrepreneur from definite success are weaknesses.
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