Example Of Entrepreneurial Leadership Report

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Entrepreneurial leadership acquires the characteristics of both entrepreneurship and leadership. Entrepreneurial leadership just not helps organization in start-up and survival, but enable them to raise significant amount of funds through appropriate sources. Entrepreneurial leadership is vital for the competitive positioning of the business. Paper also discussed the Islamic entrepreneurship and it has been encountered that there is a similarity between entrepreneurial leadership and Islamic leadership because like entrepreneurial leadership the focus of Islamic entrepreneurship is on customer needs. It has been determined that due to inefficiency of interest based funding many businesses have to face failure that encourages entrepreneurs and economist to consider the interest free or Islamic funding; the most common example of such funding is crowd sourcing.

WHAT IS ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP?

Before moving ahead, it is pivotal top realizes the concept of entrepreneurial leadership this will allow presenting the accurate information and concepts application.
1.1 Entrepreneurship:
The person known, as entrepreneur is the core of entrepreneurship, an entrepreneur is person that has an ability to start a business through realizing the gap that has not been filled by any other. Entrepreneur is a person who takes on an organization, raise capital to finance the organization, and take the responsibility of risk. Entrepreneur has an ability to manage change, to innovate, seeking the opportunities.
1.2 Leadership:
In order to manage change leaders must respond to the changing situations. Survival of the organization demands the management of innovation and change; leaders is the one who guide people and get the work done through people in best possible way.
1.3 Entrepreneurial Leadership:
The entrepreneurship and leadership has been explained to highlight the new concept entrepreneurial leadership. It has been determined that in the last 20 years these two concepts leadership and entrepreneurship has not been separate from each other and has come as a new viewpoint of entrepreneurial leadership. In order to flourish, regardless of size entrepreneurial leadership is vital for all organizations. Entrepreneurial leaders are visionary and always seek for opportunities rather to be satisfied with present situation; they know and take advantage from their unfair advantage, which means finding the opportunity within the organization. For example, rather to look outside to find the opportunity, entrepreneur leaders try to create opportunity from what they have. Entrepreneur leaders get the people on the board and put in to their vision, they have an ability to learn, they are open to feedback, and flexible to adaptability. Entrepreneur leaders are persistent to their vision and execution of that vision (Warren, 2012).

ROLE OF ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP IN NEW BUSINESS ARENA:

It has been realized that the competitiveness of business and increased turbulence is the outcome of entrepreneurial leadership. According to Cogliser and Brigham (2004), entrepreneurship is a special case of leadership. Entrepreneurial leadership allows organizations to uncover the covered opportunities; it is based on the leader identifying, creating, and exploiting the opportunities in a risk taking and innovative way (Currie et al., 2008). Different leadership styles are used in entrepreneurial leadership and the utilization of leadership style is solely dependent upon the entrepreneur’s vision (Li et al., 2013). Entrepreneurial leadership results in creative, autonomous, risk taking, committed, and proactive employees who are able to get the high economic performance (Zijlstra, 2014). Entrepreneurial leaders gain the objective through the utilization of scares resources and by solving the particular context requirements and enhance the success rate and survival rate of new ventures (Ingley and Lockhart 2015). Entrepreneurial leaders through their knowledge, intelligence, positive self-esteem, high tolerance to ambiguity, and relentless behavior enable organizations to be competitive and successful for long, which is the need of current business arena (Rashid and Ismail, 2014).

Entrepreneurial Leadership And Competitive Positioning

Entrepreneurs have to keep lean and change in order to survive. Entrepreneurial leadership has positive impact over business. In a Forbes’ article, seven principles of entrepreneurial leadership have been highlighted that pose significant positive impact over the businesses (Zwilling 2014).

Entrepreneurial leadership demands to have complete focus on delivering to the consumers.

It asks to optimize risk rather to minimize it, because minimizing risk can limit the opportunities. However, risk is identified in advance before any disaster happens.
Entrepreneurial leadership demands to be innovative and creative on constant basis in order to be better and improve the competitive position of the organization.

Entrepreneurial leaders are ready to take responsibilities for the results of the organization.

Entrepreneurial leadership helps organization to be competitive by thinking out of the box or understanding the larger picture of the situation.
Managers mostly in larger organizations in order to impress people make things complicated, but entrepreneurial leaders keep everything simple rather to be complicated.
In order to inspire people and put the organization at competitive position entrepreneurial leaders cater and represent clear vision and target; because in order to attain the common goals of the organization, employees must have vision and step by step target through achieving then they can get the organizational goals.

ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP AND FUND RAISING:

Fund raising is an important aspect in business and in order to be efficient it is essential that funds are raised from appropriate sources. it has been determined through the analysis of several researches that entrepreneurs face significant barriers in raising funds while entrepreneurial leadership skills has been substantial and significant in the process of fund raising. The traits of entrepreneurial leadership help organizations in successful fund raising. In current arena, where thousands of businesses are constantly, and rapidly taking place at international level, and demand huge amount of capital in order to take start and sustain; in such a critical situation entrepreneurs find difficulties in searching out the sources of finance. Even those who are successful in getting finance still could not have appropriate amount for their capital starving businesses (Yand & Rocher 2012). Selection of right sources of funds for the organizations is as important as the right location or right form of ownership (Zimmerer, Scarborough & Wilson 2002). It has been determined that inefficient sources of fund raising are the major cause of business failures. For example, in China 30 percent of business go bankrupt at annual level, and up to 62 percent is failed due to ineffective fundraising. Here, researchers came to know that entrepreneurs just not required running the business but their intelligence and creativity counts when business put efforts in financing (Yang and Rocher 2012). Entrepreneurial leaders have clear understanding of factors that make external fund raising desirable and feasible. For example, Entrepreneurial leaders have abilities to motivate the founder teams’ members to make constant efforts in seeking the funds from external sources for their businesses. They have expertise in convincing others for their business ideas (Grunhagen 2008).
3.1 Crowd Funding:
Crowd funding the most common example of innovative initiative, which has been recognized by entrepreneurial leaders. Crowd funding is the process of raising funds for the business by raising multiple small amounts of funds from larger pool of people; Crowd funding is a sort of donation (Pieper 2014). Entrepreneurial leaders mostly search for natural sources of fundraising in order to make a startup. Crowd funding is an external fund raising source through which matured companies and new organization, can raise fund by presenting their ideas to a crowd. Here, in order to inspire people and present the clear business model and vision is essential and entrepreneurial leaders are expert in it. If people are satisfied and find any worth in idea, they release funds for the idea in order to turn that into reality. It has been realized that the trend of crowd funding is increasing as statistics showed that in 2012, the global funds that were raised by crowd funding were $2.7 billion that were higher than $1.5 billion of 2011 and in 2013, the volume increased up to $6.1 billion; and in 2015 it has been expected that this source of funding will be used more aggressively and the global crowd funding amount will be up to $34.4 billion.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ISLAMIC AND WESTERN ENTREPRENEURIAL LEADERSHIP

4.1 Western Entrepreneurship and Islamic Entrepreneurship:
After having detailed look over entrepreneurial leadership, it is pivotal to consider Islamic entrepreneurship. This is the mistaken concept that Islam does not encourage entrepreneurship. In fact, in Islam people are encouraged to be engaged in entrepreneurial and productive endeavors (Kayed and Hassan 2011). However, there is some difference between the western and Islamic philosophies of entrepreneurship. In western view, the entrepreneur is the one who has an ability to maximize his personal or organization based profit and the success of the organization is measured through financial stability and profitability; in the whole process, entrepreneurs through their economic activities many benefits the society but the social welfare may not be the major motivation to encourage the entrepreneurs. The western entrepreneurial leaders seek to opportunities to maximize their personal monetary benefits; and benefiting the society comes at second. However, unlike the western entrepreneurial leaders, Islamic entrepreneurial leadership follow the preaching of Islam, all ethical and Islamic standards are followed by the entrepreneurial leaders; the major goal of Islamic entrepreneurs is to benefit the society rather to focus on individual benefits only.
However, in western world, the implication of Islamic entrepreneurship can be seen such as Islamic entrepreneurial leaders are liable to follow the Shari’ah laws, they are motivated by the needs of the society; engaged in productive business that involves services and real goods, and risk taking is avoided. In addition, Islamic entrepreneurs prefer to finance business through making partnership or raising funds that are interest free. Same as Islamic entrepreneurship, most of the western entrepreneurs also search for opportunities in order to satisfy the unmet needs of society. Nevertheless, unlike Islamic entrepreneurs, western entrepreneurs are motivated by their personal wealth maximization, often materialistic in nature, selfish goals come at first, and financing is based on debt and equity, and ready to take even higher risks (Hassan and Hippler 2014).
4.2 Western Fund Raising and Islamic Fund Raising
The core difference between the Islamic fund raising and western fund raising is “interest”. Interest is also known as Riba; Islam does not support Riba-based financing due to its negative consequences. Several businesses fail due to improper management of finance; risk of finance refers to the chances of business collapse that can occur due to wrong financial decisions, policies, or strategies; from several reasons one is interest capitalization that result in business failure (Joseph 2006). Even, when world’s economy suffered from economic recession and financial crisis, Islamic financing or interest free financing has been considered as an alternative financing model by world’s economist. Because these crisis occurred due to the failure of transparency, legislation, and regulations that has multiple affects such as larger deficits in balance of payments and extreme monetary expansion and all this was result of interest rate Islamic entrepreneurs has focus on interest free and halal financing that separate them from western entrepreneurs. As it has been discussed that the crowd funding is increasing rapidly; it is considered that crowd funding is an idea that has been taken form Islamic finance. This is the major reason that encouraged the economist to thing Islamic financing or Islamic entrepreneurship (Abdelmoula and Abidi 2013).
The experience that have been gained from studies and analysis is that the chances of failure in interest free funding are far lower as compare interest based financing and in order to be successful Islamic entrepreneurial leadership is a best option to choose. Analysis changed the way of thinking in a sense that it presented different dimensions of entrepreneurial leadership and benefit of Islamic entrepreneurship over western entrepreneurship. Most importantly, analysis helped in resolving the misconception that entrepreneurial activities are prohibited in Islam.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS:

It has been analyzed that entrepreneurial leadership is not an old concept and has been derived from entrepreneurship and leadership. In order to start-up and survive the venture entrepreneurial leadership is mandatory. It has several characteristics that separate entrepreneurial leaders from the entrepreneurs. It has been realized that due to several reasons west is moving towards the interest free funding sources and the trend of interest free funding is increasing year on year. Islamic entrepreneurs are motivated by the needs of people and it has been determined that west is also promoting this thinking in their business as they find opportunities by analyzing the unmet needs of people. In Islam, bribery is prohibited and if west is considered then several laws have been presented in this regard and bribery has been prohibited in western entrepreneurship as well.

Recommendations:

After having detailed analysis, it has been recommended that businesses must take start by interest free financing and should keep all entrepreneurial leadership activities in practice because entrepreneurial leadership activities help entrepreneurs in gaining finance.
There are several options that can be acquire to start a business such as partnership, franchising, and joint venture that will help entrepreneurs in sharing financial responsibilities, but if the sole propriety is the option then fund raising source that should be used include crowd funding. This funding strategy has been successful for multiple businesses around the globe and the rate of crowd sourcing is increasing rapidly.
Islamic entrepreneurship is a better way to be successful because it opens up opportunities that are not bounded by specific laws such as in Islam, social responsibility has been considered mandatory; and west has been introducing the laws as well in which organizations are forced to realize the social responsibility. Like environmental sustainability law, labor right law, and community’s welfare law.

References

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