Business and Entrepreneurship – Understanding key differences

When you see a shopkeeper or merchant, what does the first thing that comes to your mind. He or she is sitting there to do business and make a profit. Where as you see an entrepreneur more as an enterprising person who is making use of an opportunity in the market. An entrepreneur will still make profits, but he or she is more of an inventor. Tony Stark of Iron Man is typically an entrepreneur who can build anything. Deepinder Goyal saw an opportunity in the market and created the food delivery app, Zomato.

Nature

It is the nature of any business to make profits. There is a structure and all business fall in the set pattern. There is not too many variations to a business. Entrepreneurship on the other hand has no structure at all.

Focus

A business aims to create jobs and make profits. There are employees, workers or staff which focus on the aim. An entrepreneurship on the other hand aims to make use of an opportunity in the market.

Risk taking

We assume that running a business is all about risk taking. However, running a business is all about safety. It is the entrepreneur who takes risks all the time. The market opportunity might just go away one day. Or the idea itself can become old and boring. Technology might change.

Innovation

There is hardly any innovation in business. In fact some business have been going on the way they were doing for maybe last 50 years. Take an example of a jewellery store in Chandni Chowk, Delhi. The only innovation they had was using WhatApp to interact with customers, and that too might be on a very tiny scale.

Ownership and Control

It is rare that business is owned by a single person. There are partners, shareholders, board members and so on. Entrepreneurs might have partners too but they usually work alone. Entrepreneurs have absolute control over everything in their venture.

Goals

A business is created with profit in mind. There are laws of corporate governance and best practices’ which define any business. At the end of the day, both have the goal of earning money in mind, businesses rather have a conservative approach while an entrepreneur does not follow any set pattern to achieve the goal.