Entrepreneurial Journey of Bill Gates: Analysis and Suggestions

This report provides an in-depth analysis of Bill Gates' entrepreneurial journey, highlighting his background, traits, opportunity recognition, and competitive advantages. It examines his focused and creative approach, his passion, and his transformational leadership style, which contributed to the success of Microsoft. The report also delves into the stages of opportunity recognition and idea development, including idea generation, identification, development, evaluation, and team assessment. Furthermore, it discusses Microsoft's competitive advantages, recommendations for future directions such as franchising, and concludes with an overview of the essential role of entrepreneurs in driving economic growth. This resource is available for students seeking similar solved assignments and study materials on Desklib.

Entrepreneurship
Project

INTRODUCTION
An entrepreneur is the person who create the new business by bearing most of the risks and
also enjoy rewards and this process is termed as entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs play an
important role for the development of economy considering the skills and initiatives which are
important to anticipate the requirements and also bring new ideas and product in the market
(Yang and Liu, 2021). For this report, Bill Gates is considered as an entrepreneur who was an
American entrepreneur and also the second richest person in the world with the net worth of
around $133 billion. He grew up in Seattle and begin his life with computers at the early age.
The following report cover background information of the entrepreneur, concerning traits,
opportunity recognition and idea development and competitive advantages.
Background of the entrepreneur
Bill Gates is an American businessman as well as an author of many books who was born in
Seattle, Washington. He is fluent in different languages such as English, German as well as Irish.
It can be said that his father was a well-known lawyer and his mother had served in the Board of
Directors for well-known organizations such as First Interstate BancSystem and United way of
America. During his early years, Gates’ parents wanted him to develop a career in law. Not only
this, his family also encouraged him to take part in different competitions in order to improve as
a runner. But as time progressed, he started taking interest in programming of the basic and also
showed his interest in math classes. It was during this time when he decided to build a career in
this field. Bill Gates wrote his first computer program and implemented the same on a tic-tac-toe
wherein the users were permitted to play games against the computer. During this time, he was
fascinated by the machine and how it always implemented the code so accurately. He was just 17
years old when he formed his start up named Traf-O-Data along with his friend Allen to make
the traffic counters based on the intel 8008 processor. He was also the national merit scholar at
the time when he graduated from the lakeside school in 1973. He also chose a pre-law major but
also took mathematics and graduate level computer science courses. Bill gates also devised an
algorithm for the pancake sorting as one of the best solution to the series of unsolved issues.
Entrepreneurial traits/characteristics
Focused: It is the main trait of Bill Gates as knowing something is quite different than
having wisdom. Bill gates also focused on one thing which is he knows best for his behaviour

that include software and also makes it best for his work. He worked hard in order to dominate
over the industry, made implementation over the top priority and also stuck with the prominent
skills which he consider to be the strongest. Bill gates also focuses through the work as he does
several things with his charitable foundations.
Creativity: Rather than staying at the comfort zone, Bill gates motivated himself and his
employees to embrace towards the creativity. His prominent leadership style works to empower
individuals due to the individual perspective as it leads to create new opportunities to explore his
mind-set and ideas (Tantau and Frăţilă, 2021). Further, people also followed him due to the
charisma which he exudes as most of the people followed Bill gates as they knew he could help
them regarding the better transformation into the better leader.
Passionate: There is no other fact that Bill gates put lot of love into each and everything as
he did for his company. Even if, the only thing he require to do was to write a thank you note and
also make sure that this message came straight from his heart. Most of the transformational
leaders believe that Bill gates tends to do something worth and did things best with his abilities.
Opportunity recognition and Idea development process
Opportunity recognition represent the suitable principal activities which takes place before
the business is being formed or structured. These stages are classified into five main steps which
are discussed as underneath:
 Getting the idea: It represent the strong link among getting the initial idea and also the
starting the new enterprise. It represents the idea for the conception of the possibility and
the reflective method for evading the barriers and challenges (Payne and Hayes, 2021).
Here, the entrepreneurs tend to search for the most suitable idea for their business and
identify the market opportunity to develop a successful business around it which is the
essential aspect of entrepreneurship.
 Opportunity identification: This theory describes the alertness and the ability of
entrepreneur to see and discover the significant opportunities (Prabhugaonkar and et. al.,
2020). It is quite difficult task as most of the opportunities do not appear but also result
from the entrepreneur’s alertness to the possibilities.
 Opportunity development: It leads to recognise the significant opportunity, timely
adaptation that suit to the actual market requirement as it is the key to new venture

success. It conveys the involvement of systematic research to refine the idea to the most
promising high potential opportunity that can be transformed into the vendible items.
 Opportunity evaluation: This stage represents the opportunity for entrepreneurs
regarding the screening and evaluation (Gerpott and Kieser, 2020). It undertakes the
professional executed evaluation that can tell the particular period or service which has
return the need to justify the investment and the suitable risk which has to be taken.
 Assessment of the entrepreneurial team: It showed that how appropriate the opportunity
may look it will not make the successful business unless it is developed by the team with
the strong skills. It represents the suitable opportunity that has been executed by asking
the pertinent questions regarding the people who would run the organisation.
Competitive advantages
Bill gates is the founder of the largest software business, Microsoft which is the
technological innovation and keen the effective business strategy. In regard of this, with his
effective leadership style and motivational skills, he tends to achieve the desired goals and
objectives and also gain competitive advantage in market (Chen, 2021). The net worth of Bill
gates is declined to $79.2 billion and the right up on this year Amancio Ortega the founder to
Zara rises with his net worth of $67 billion.
Besides from this, the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos also increased dramatically this year
with the net worth of $45.2 billion. Apart from that, the co-founder to Microsoft and real estate
mogul Paul Allen listed at the no. 40 with the net worth of $17.5 billion. But with the help of
transformational leadership style he tends to achieve the competitive advantage for Microsoft.
Recommendations
From the above discussion, franchising has been recommended to the respective
entrepreneur as rather than owning and operating all the significant locations, they can provide
the effective business model as the franchise opportunity by allowing other entrepreneurs to run
each establishment under the brand name. It includes the franchise agreement in which the
franchisees are on the same page. Here, they just need the disclosure document or the FDD the
provide the potential franchisees as they need to know regarding their company, sales figures and
other key business details. Companies also require the franchisees to pay fees as there is an
initial one-time franchise fee and after going to the annual fees. This fees are based on the

percentage of the monthly gross revenue as these fees may be beyond the savings of
entrepreneurs.
CONCLUSION
From the above discussion, it has been analysed that entrepreneur is the person who tends to
carry personal risk for the pursuit of new business, innovation and some other form of enterprise.
Entrepreneurs are also the essential aspect of the economy as they help for the growth to take
risk over the innovative ideas. In regard of this, it includes details about the background of
entrepreneur, suitable traits and characteristics, idea development procedure for the specific
product and achievement of competitive advantage.

REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Chen, Y.S., 2021. Sustainability Innovation Enabled by Digital Entrepreneurship in Franchise
Organizations. International Journal of E-Entrepreneurship and Innovation
(IJEEI), 11(1), pp.71-85.
Gerpott, F.H. and Kieser, A., 2020. The Fairytale of the Successful Entrepreneur: Reasons and
Remedies for the Prevalent Ideology of Entrepreneurship. In Against
Entrepreneurship (pp. 133-151). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Payne, G.T. and Hayes, N.T., 2021. Social Capital, Entrepreneurship, and Family
Businesses. Family Entrepreneurship: Insights from Leading Experts on Successful
Multi-Generational Entrepreneurial Families, p.331.
Prabhugaonkar, Y.B and et. al., 2020. Asian entrepreneurship in tourism and hospitality:
Financial support, business sustainability. Entrepreneurial development and innovation
in family businesses and SMEs, pp.1-21.
Tantau, A.D. and Frăţilă, L.C., 2021. Entrepreneurship, Start Up, and Corporate
Entrepreneurship in the Renewable Energy Industry. In Research Anthology on Small
Business Strategies for Success and Survival (pp. 132-155). IGI Global.
Yang, S. and Liu, Z., 2021. Construction of innovation and entrepreneurship teaching scene
under the background of numeral intelligence: Based on the theory of actor-
network. The International Journal of Electrical Engineering & Education,
p.00207209211013496.