Entrepreneurship – a mentality with a future!

published by Alexander Bode at 21. May 2018

C reativity, the ability to do something new and the courage to implement it and to accept failure are the hallmarks of the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship is therefore an attitude of mind that is gaining in importance, especially in the digital world. Good examples of this can now be seen in the start-up environment, but the number of full-time start-ups in Germany has been declining for years.

In a professional world that is becoming more and more dynamic, nothing is certain anymore. Large companies that were world market leaders a few years ago are being forced out of their markets by disruptive innovations from individual start-ups. Those affected are primarily the employees who lose their well-paid jobs.

As an entrepreneur, you experience defeats and setbacks week after week. You learn how to deal with them and draw conclusions for your future actions. In a digital world where failure is part of a successful career, this is a first important characteristic.

The speed of change in the digital world continues to make it necessary to respond flexibly to new opportunities. But change is not so difficult: Everyone who owns a smartphone communicates today in a completely different way at work and at home than ten years ago.

The entrepreneur consciously takes up technological change, but does not limit himself to the user perspective, but considers how he can offer his customers new products and services with the help of the new possibilities. In a digital world, technological leaps are taking place that companies and employees have to adapt to. The faster one adapts new technologies and makes them usable for one’s own purposes, the sooner one can profit from these developments. This is currently particularly evident in the digitalization of production, where machines communicate with each other and robots complement manual production.

After all, many technologies require highly specialized knowledge and skills to master them. Even large companies today are hardly in a position to build up suitable skills in the short of time. Employees must be open and willing to cooperate and take advantage of the lack of know-how in this way.

Successful entrepreneurs increasingly cooperate along the value chain with suppliers and customers, but also with completely new companies, such as start-ups. The aim is to develop flexible production systems that offer customers a product from a single source. This creates a completely new view of the customer and his needs, for example, when a heating engineer together with independent fitters offers the customer hot water and heating energy and the customer no longer has to deal with the selection of the device and its maintenance.

So what distinguishes an entrepreneur in a digital world?

Flexibility with regard to environmental changes, openness to cooperation, creativity in the search for new solutions and the willingness to take risks in order to implement things easily.