An entrepreneur is a person who creates something new and assumes the risks and rewards associated with that innovation. An entrepreneur performs all the required functions from the genesis of an idea up to the establishment of an enterprise. A manager is a person responsible for controlling or administering an organization or group of staff.
Sometimes a manager and an entrepreneur are considered as same. But, there are some basic differences between them. These are as follows:
Entrepreneur – usually seen as an innovator, a source of new ideas, goods, services, and business/or procedures.
- Definition: An entrepreneur is a person who creates something new and assumes the risks and rewards associated with that innovation.
- Motive: The main motive of an entrepreneur is to start a venture by setting up an enterprise.
- Status: An entrepreneur is the owner of the enterprise.
- Risk-bearing: An entrepreneur assumes all risks and uncertainty involved in running the enterprise.
- Rewards: An entrepreneur gets profit as his reward for bearing risks.
- Innovation: An entrepreneur is an innovator.
- Qualifications needed: High achievement motive, creativity, foresight, risk-bearing ability and so on.
Manager – is the person who is responsible for managing an organization.
- Definition: A manager is an employee of the entrepreneur who performs all managerial functions for the entrepreneur’s enterprise.
- Motive: But, the main motive of an entrepreneur is to render his service in an enterprise already set up by someone else.
- Status: A manager is a servant in the enterprise owned by the entrepreneur.
- Risk-bearing: A manager does not bear any risk involved in the enterprise.
- Rewards: A manager gets a salary as his reward for rendering his service.
- Innovation: A manager converts the entrepreneur’s ideas into practice.
- Qualifications needed: Sound knowledge in management theory and practice.
From the above discussion, it is clear that an entrepreneur, at times, can be a manager but a manager cannot be an entrepreneur. After all, an entrepreneur is an owner, but a manager is a servant. So, it has been rightly said “All managers are entrepreneurs, but all entrepreneurs are not a manager.
