A Case Study on International Entrepreneurship: The OYO Story

This case study delves into the entrepreneurial journey of Ritesh Agarwal and the remarkable success of OYO Rooms in the international market. It explores the motivations behind setting up the venture, supported by theories like Burn's transformational leadership theory and effectuation theories. The analysis covers familial influences, prior experiences, and the role of technology in OYO's global expansion, particularly the use of a transformation app and machine learning algorithms for dynamic pricing and revenue management. The study further examines how OYO exploited opportunities by focusing on innovation, risk-seeking behavior, and proactive measures to gain a competitive advantage. The case study concludes that international entrepreneurship combines innovation, risk-taking, and technology to achieve long-term success and generate higher value for customers.

Case Study on an
International
Entrepreneur
CW-1

Table of Contents
Part A:..............................................................................................................................................3
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Motivation to set up the ventures/businesses supported by theories;.....................................3
Burn's transformational leadership theory:.............................................................................4
Effectuation theories:..............................................................................................................5
PART B............................................................................................................................................6
Family and (International) entrepreneurship...................................................................................7
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................8
References........................................................................................................................................9

Part A:
Introduction
International entrepreneurship is related with strong influence in entrepreneur and
networks that have been established with foreign individuals. There are different types of
entrepreneur who have been previously unnoticed profit opportunities, the entrepreneur
discovery initiates a process with newly discovered profit opportunities in the market place until
there there is market competition that eliminates the profit opportunity (Sharma and et.al., 2017).
Ritesh agarwal is a Indian entrepreneur and founder well known as the CEO of OYO rooms,
OYO hotels that is world's fastest growing hotel chains he founded this company at the age of
19. at such early age he was able to achieve business success, game and financial prosperity. He
came with a innovative idea of hotel booking software when such opportunity was not identified.
Present Freeport is based on making analysis of the various different aspects that is motivating a
entrepreneur for the purpose of starting of a new venture and further achievement of the laid
aims and objectives in long run.
Motivation to set up the ventures/businesses supported by theories;
There is need to develop a detail understanding of the way motivation is affecting the
entrepreneurial mindset to set up a new business venture. There are family influence prior
experiences, and other motivational concepts that posses a impact on the way business are
supported.
familial influences: Ritesh belongs to a simple family that is a running a small local shop in
southern orissa, he always waned to do something different from his family (Ferraz and
Fernandez, 2020). So he started working with SMEs and tried to bring the required sales. It was
his second venture that started making success too slowly.
prior experience: Ritesh agarwal has doubted own abilities to do well in working, before
achieving success ritesh failed six times before starting of the OYO venture.
push and pull factors, other motivational theories
Trait theories:
Trait theories is the personality traits reflect the people pattern of thoughts, behaviours and
feelings. It is based on the idea that people differ from each other based on the intensity of trait

dimensions. There are three types of personality traits that includes individual differences,
stability and consistency.
Burn's transformational leadership theory:
Transformational leaders are inspiring subordinates to work together for achievement of
common objectives by changing their expectation, beliefs,. Burns also quoted some of the
impressive results by analysing the transformational leadership where subordinates and leaders
are getting positively affected because of the transformational strategy.
Transactional and transformational leadership: In case of Present selected entrepreneur that
is Ritesh aware as the transformational leadership is the basic concept of value creation and a
value added approach towards motivating subordinates in a positive way to achieve the mission
and vision statement of the business (Sharma, 2019).
There are main two assumption based on this theory:
 Leader with position of high morals and motivates people to great extent and makes them
follow with full enthusiasm
 It is better to work as team to achieve common vision and shared objectives for higher
performance and better results as compared with other individuals.
Ritesh agarwal is the advocate of distributed leadership that decided to change and transform the
present structure of people stay x(Kumar and Sharma, 2020). The speed at which OYO achieved
consensus has changed gears and rallied the overall organisation to deliver the new strategy that
illustrates the way founders can work towards distributing leadership to drive scale.
There are some of the traits that are mentioned below:
Openness: It is associated with low score if the entrepreneur is practical or conventional and
high if it is curious. Ritesh agarwal being the founder of OYO is curious having wide range of
interests.
Conscientiousness: It is low score if there is impulsive, disorganised nature of work, high score
if the if the individual is hard-working and organized. In this aspect the entrepreneur is organised
and hard-working that helped in the process of development of the venture (Kumar and Sharma,
2020).
Extraversion: High score is related with warm, seeking adventure and outgoing. For Ritesh
agarwal as founder of OYO rooms is outgoing, seeks adventure.

Agreeableness: In present scenario of Ritesh agarwal is having traits of trust, help and
empathetic and there is high score.
Neuroticism: In this trait there is more focus on low score that is related with traits of calm and
tempered. Ritesh agarwal as CEO posses traits of being calm and patient that helped in the
process of effective working in the entrepreneurial venture.
OYO rooms is based on a simple business model (Ferraz and Fernandez, 2019). That is a
platform that was offering comfortable rooms based on basic necessities that were present in this
model. OYO gave options to the budget travellers to make sure that auditing team visited every
place that they signed up. Ritesh at the age of 19 yeas is a prolific learner having a intellectual
and strong curiosity that sets the pace from tip. With his present skill sets he has door stopped
star founders.
Effectuation theories:
Effectuation theory is proposed by Sarasvathy that is analysing the “causation theories” it is
based on analysis that entrepreneurs starts with goal and then further acquire resources that are
essentially required for achievement of goal (Ramnath and Assisi, 2018). It is a process of
evaluating of resources that are available today to make recombination of resources. The
entrepreneurs have to recombine the resources to accept the floating goals in the time period and
then allowing resources that are available to guide and further evolution of strategies.
There are five major principles that are associated with this theory as mentioned below:
Bird in hand principle: The bird in hand beats in bush it refers to maximisation of use of what
entrepreneur Knows related to background, experience, who they know that is family, friends
around them and alignment of options.
The affordable loss principle: It is related with affordable losses that is minimisation of potential
losses, it involves taking into consideration low probability bets.
The crazy quilts principle: This principle is based on wearing of potential partners.
The lemonade principle: Lemonade is associated with analysing potential in under utilised and
depressed resources, it is similar to alertness principle (Sriram and et.al., 2020).
Pilot in plane principle: In this there is need to focus on today and not up coming future time
period.
In present scenario of ritesh agarwal has adopted the lemonade principle. It is based on
usage of the resources that have been under utilised or not properly utilised. The main idea of the

entrepreneurial venture was to ensure that people who are willing to look for some proper
minimum stay facilities at affordable and reasonable prices can get it as per their preferences.
PART B
Theme 1: Technology and (International) entrepreneurship: Technology entrepreneurship
posses a strong influence on the entrepreneur and the way entrepreneur establishing networks
with foreign boundaries. The term international entrepreneurship was originated with the
emerging technological advances have allowed new ventures to access towards untapped foreign
markets. It comprises of innovative activities that is aimed at creating value and growth in
business organisations. The success and utilisation of the opportunity is dependent on the way
own abilities are being utilised of converting the opportunity into a successful business plan.
Ritesh agarwal developed a transformation app that enables the team to understand the
transformation needs. The in built OYO app helps owners in monitoring of progress and further
access payment related information. It also assist in developing an overview of the business
performance, cash flows, pricing, customer reviews & recommendations. There is use of internet
technology where app consist of advanced analytics that can enable deep dive into asset
performance with time, intuitive interfaced that helps in easy navigation and making decisions
with respect to value added services it leads to boosting of performance and easy to understand
metrics & graphs which leads to daily monitoring of performance. In oyo the main technology
transformation took place with inventory allocation, pricing and revenue management that is
driven by machine learning based algorithm for dynamic pricing and prediction. The algorithm is
used to make 60 million micro optimisations each day to arrive at optimal price point which
ensures that there is affordable stay for guests that may drive high yields and there is occupancy
across 23000 buildings that are part of OYO's chain. It helps hotel chain to drive RevPAR based
on micro locations that helps in adjusting dynamically to demand and supply in peak times.
Theme 2: Exploitation of opportunities: international entrepreneurs are working towards having
entrepreneur real behaviour that is oriented to evaluation enactment discovery and exploitation of
opportunities across international borders. It is focused on creation of higher value to get a
competitive advantage based on the clear emphasis towards opportunity focus areas. It is a
driving aspect that leads to international opportunity that is converted into a business idea. There
is a conceptual basis that is notion of social context and helps international entrepreneurs to set
the objective criteria.

Features of chosen theme:
Conclusion based on part A and part B
It is concluded from the overall discussion made from both the parts A and B that international
entrepreneurship is associated with the way there is combination of innovation and risk seeking
behaviour and proactive measures. There is focus on creativity and exploitation of opportunities
that lie outside the domestic market in the percent of achieving competitive advantage. The main
focus is to generate higher value and offered the necessary required products and services to the
target segment of customers. There are different factors that are supporting an entrepreneur in
development of necessary traits that lead towards long term success in form of achievement of
laid aims and objectives.
Technology and (International) entrepreneurship
Technology entrepreneurship is the the aspect that is related with launching and growing of firms
with regional economic development, it is associated with selection of appropriate stakeholders
to utilised relevant ideas from the market. The main purpose is to understand that investment in
in technology is for capturing and Creating value for organisation. Technology entrepreneurship
is the vehicle that facilitates prosperity in firms, regions, nations and individuals. The study is
associated with serving important function to Satisfy beyond intellectual curiosity.
Ritesh agarwal had a main focus on realising that travellers had to compromise on quality,
location and pricing of hotels, he as a entrepreneur ensure that OYO rooms are able to cater the
needs. Using Airbnb he ensure that OYO room is not only a platform to list hotels but provide
support to independent and small hotel owners to improve their business offering through right
customer support.
Renovation capabilities: OYO empowered to add up 80,000 keys to chain that is to set a new
benchmark for renovating and transforming assets. There was a technological transformation
focussing on creation of a app that enables OYO room to understand the transformation
requirements by giving of cost estimates & budgets along with assignment of tasks. There was
tracking at pace that enable OYO team to understand the process.
Technology is deeply embedded in the business model of OYO. It was the very first company in
the hospitality sector to introduce technology based solution in the supplier side so that there can
be management of end to end operations starting from on-boarding, customer services

transformation. There is intrescetio0n of real estate, technology and hospitality that having large
number of technological products that can power such business verticals (INNOVATIONS AT
OYO HOTELS & HOMES THAT MAKE IT A GLOBAL HOSPITALITY, 2020).

Conclusion
It is concluded from the above made analysis that international entrepreneurship is related
with different connected aspects that is helping a individual to grow and enhance their business.
There are different associated traits that are helping individuals in performing their roles and
responsibility as per the needs of the laid entrepreneurial venture.

References
Books and journal
Sharma and et.al., 2017. OYO Rooms: Providing affordable hotel stays. Emerald Emerging
Markets Case Studies.
Ferraz, E. and Fernandez, G., 2020. Ritesh Agarwal: Founder and CEO (Global), OYO Hotels &
Homes. In Asian Founders at Work (pp. 75-89). Apress, Berkeley, CA.
Rani, R. and Kumar, N., The dynamics of link between entrepreneurship, government support
and economic growth: Evidence from BRICS countries. Journal of Public Affairs,
p.e2741.
Sriram and et.al., 2020. Entrepreneurship in Africa: Context and Perspectives. Routledge.
Sharma, D., 2019. How to recruit, incentivize and retain Millennials. Sage Publications Pvt.
Limited.
Ferraz, E. and Fernandez, G., 2019. Asian founders at work: stories from the region’s top
technopreneurs. Apress.
Ramnath, N.S. and Assisi, C., 2018. The Aadhaar effect: Why the world’s largest identity project
matters. Oxford University Press.
Grover, H. and Goyal, V., 2020. Let's Build a Company: A Start-up Story Minus the Bullshit.
Penguin Random House India Private Limited.
Kumar, R. and Sharma, M., 2020. Venture Capital Investments. Sage Publications Pvt. Limited.
Aggarwal, V., 2018. Leading Science and Technology: India Next?. SAGE Publishing India.
Ferraz, E. and Fernandez, G., 2019. Asian founders at work: stories from the region’s top
technopreneurs. Apress.
Online:
INNOVATIONS AT OYO HOTELS & HOMES THAT MAKE IT A GLOBAL
HOSPITALITY, 2020 [online], Available
through<https://www.oyorooms.com/officialoyoblog/2019/09/10/innovations-at-oyo-hotels-
homes-that-make-it-a-global-hospitality-giant>