Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Student’s Name
Course
Date

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Introduction
An entrepreneur is defined as an individual running a small business, assumes all the
risks, and rewards rather than working as an employee in a company. In a business perspective,
an entrepreneur is seen as a source of new ideas, services, goods, procedures, business and
innovations. Entrepreneurs play a great role in the economy as they have skills and initiatives
essential in anticipating future and current needs in order to come up with innovations.
Therefore, the paper seeks to identify an entrepreneur in Canada, describe the entrepreneur
characteristics or traits, opportunities and competitive advantage he or she has in the market.
Background of the entrepreneur
Garrett Camp is a Canadian entrepreneur born in 1978. Camp pursued a bachelor's degree
in electrical engineering although he later changed his career to Software engineering a field that
helped him to design platforms such as Uber mobile application. Coming from entrepreneurship
family, Camp followed the footsteps of his father who he termed as his “role model” to venture
into entrepreneurship. The skills and experiences he gained while operating his father’s business
inspired him to come up with ideas of starting his own company. Furthermore, Camp’s
entrepreneurship started at University as he used to get ideas from the colleagues and later
implemented them. Furthermore, he started his first business while still at university.
The camp is the founder of StumbleUpon which is a web-discovery platform.
Furthermore, he also founded Uber which operates as a transportation network company in
countrywide since 2009. In 2013, Camp also formed Expa which is a startup video studio that
develops and launches new products. Currently, the net worth of Camp is estimated to be $US
4.9 billion and he is serving as a chairman of both Uber and Stumble companies.
Entrepreneur traits or characteristics

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Creative and innovative are the most desirable characteristics of an entrepreneur. Creative
involves coming up with original ideas that are unique in order to introduce a new product or
services that have a competitive advantage in the market. Through the creativity of Camp, many
consumers worldwide are happily enjoying the services of Uber. Furthermore, upon inventing
physical Uber services, Camp was creative to introduce a supporting mobile application features
that helped customers to order for the services online conveniently. Risky taker is also an
entrepreneurship characteristic of Garrett Camp. A risks taker is “an entrepreneur who is willing
to take risks such as financial losses in order to grab an opportunity in the market and achieve a
goal. Garrett Camp’s ability to take risks while university-assisted him to become a successful
entrepreneur in the future. Despite his friends having good ideas of generating income, they
lacked risk-taking traits to implement them. Instead, they sold ideas to Camp who converted
those ideas to actions. Research conducted by Hammond, Neff, Farr, Schwall and Zhao (2011
p.90) shows that 80 percent of ideas and the most profitable business in the world today came
from people who feared to risks their finances to invest on their ideas.
Opportunity recognition and idea development process
Opportunity recognition is defined as a continuous cognitive process of analyzing
opportunities to create new products and services that generate economic value. According to Lu
and Gou (2009 an idea development is a process of creating an idea, innovating the concepts and
developing a process that brings the concepts to reality. Garrett Camp began its opportunity
recognition by conducting market research to identify the arising consumer needs. After
thorough market research, he realized that consumers needed a reliable and accessible means of
transport. With some people not able to access personal cars and other in need of emergency
transport services, Camp identified this opportunity and generated an idea of introducing Uber