Relationship Between Entrepreneurs and Customers to Drive Innovation

By Mohammad Anas Wahaj; MBA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2000, USA; BS in Mechanical Engineering, Aligarh Muslim University, 1993, India
Dated: 07 March 2015

Entrepreneurs bring creative ideas and innovations into the market. They take risks and invest their efforts, time and money. They identify unmet needs, generate employment, develop and improve products and services for the consumers and also for other businesses.

To achieve fulfilment of their goals they require support from their environment, which includes people, markets and governments. A healthy entrepreneurial community expects and needs a facilitating ecosystem where their ideas reach fruition and benefits the society as a whole.

Although everyone recognizes and acknowledges the importance of entrepreneurship for growth and development of the economy and there are variety of efforts, both by senior and successful entrepreneurs, private companies, organizations and governments to develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem at various places around the globe. But they seem to be lopsided and region-focused and sometimes just a fad without well thought out plan, consistency and commitment.

It is often observed that some places become successful entrepreneurial hubs while others continue to struggle and always keep on playing the catch-up game. Some even totally lose their entrepreneurial ecosystem due to migration of talent and even companies that start to search for better opportunities elsewhere.

In recent times, technology has tried to create a level playing field for budding entrepreneurs in different regions but it can support only some aspects of entrepreneurial and business development. Entrepreneurship and its inherent spirit has to flourish in every nook and corner of the world and every industry should get a chance to benefit from it. Entrepreneurs bring new energy into businesses and markets that otherwise become complacent and resistant to innovation once the products and services get customer's initial acceptance and start getting established as successful brands.

A strong partnership and relationship need to develop between entrepreneurs and customers, where customers continuously seek innovative and better products and services and entrepreneurs, even within the established organizations, continue to work to improve them. Customers can be important catalysts in the entrepreneurial ecosystem by showing their never-ending appetite towards betterment of everything that markets have to offer. The continuously evolving and growing relationship and exchange between entrepreneurs and customers will keep the wheel of creative and innovative activities moving.

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