Do you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur? It’s a question many struggle with for years before starting their own business. Perhaps they are asking themselves the wrong question completely. There is a far better one around – “What kind of entrepreneur are you?” – put by Joseph Pistrui, Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at IE Business School in Madrid in a workshop at the MERIT Summit in Lisbon earlier this year.

Who are the entrepreneurs of today?

Mr Pistrui showed that asking yourself “Do I have what it takes” to be an entrepreneur simply reinforces old biases – that an entrepreneur needed to be some sort of swashbuckling, risk loving maverick. That bias no longer represents the truth as entrepreneurs today come in many forms.

In truth, Mr Pistrui noted, two of the common entrepreneurial challenges are dealing with a high level of uncertainty around outcomes and having many possibilities for action in order to achieve an outcome. On uncertainty, entrepreneurs can be anywhere along the spectrum from having a highly reasoned/research mentality towards exploring uncertainty to a far more carefree “just play around with it and see what happens” attitude. Regarding possibilities, entrepreneurs can be highly structured about which possibilities they will consider or completely open to all possible courses of action.

Where do entrepreneurs make a difference?

In addition, entrepreneurship today should not be associated simply with setting up a business. There are entrepreneurs within divisions of established companies, within intra-disciplinary teams, and within collaborative international teams. It matters not where they find themselves – what matters more is that they are using imagination, creativity, and innovation to drive themselves forward.

This indeed is central to the theme of the MERIT Summit for 2019 – Co-creating Learning Organisations. Managers at every corporate level can nurture their entrepreneurial skill sets, both by working with their colleagues and by bringing in outside perspectives and expertise from business schools to drive their learning capabilities further forward. Mr Pistrui’s perspectives help us look ahead in the next MERIT Summit. They fire the imagination of HR and L&D decision-makers to create more space for intrapreneurship – and enable it to flourish across organisational silos.

Entrepreneurs and large-scale corporates need not feel so different – and they can learn so much from each other. So don’t ask yourself whether you have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Ask yourself instead what kind of entrepreneur you are and with whom you could work to achieve and learn great things in your organisation.

This article was kindly provided by Trevor Merriden, Managing Director, Merriborn – Content, Communities and Collaboration in Action.