Going Beyond the Normal: What it Means to be an Entrepreneur During Pandemic

Abstract

The COVID pandemic jolted the world from deep slumber by forcing business units to move beyond self-defined normal and embrace, adopt and create a new normal instead. In other words, broaden the horizon of business world. For example, today we are witnessing eruption of new business models, who are generating substantial revenue while serving customers through contact less delivery and enhanced digital payment mechanisms. However, all these innovative business models have an innate feature of entrepreneurship. This paper addresses the following research questions in the context of global pandemic (a) Who is an entrepreneur? (b)What are the traits of being an entrepreneur? and (c) What means and mechanisms are needed to ensure that the spirit of entrepreneurship is maintained in an environment wherein the COVID virus emerges in stages with each stage being ruthless and unmerciful than the previous stage? The design and development of the paper is based on theory of entrepreneurial competency (Bird, B.,2019); Conceptual development of entrepreneurial skills and entrepreneurial intentions (Shabbir, M. S., 2016) and theory of effectiveness of the entrepreneurship education ( Din, B. H., Anuar, A. R., 2016). Primary and secondary data is used during the development and data collection and analysis of research questions. The respondents were students from higher educational institutes from National Capital Region. The scope of the study is restricted to pandemic environment. Purposive sampling is used in data collection process. The Questionnaire comprised of two parts. One part captured the demographic details of the respondents while the other part captured the responses of 54 questions. The statistical technique applied is descriptive data analysis and multivariate regression. The findings indicate that the entrepreneurship is an innate characteristic of an individual and that these need to be constantly developed and improved upon, especially in an environment wherein the entire world is living in an environment of lockdowns and reduced economic activities. The managerial implication of the study stems from the fact that new avenues need to be explored and work upon so as to continue to provide value to the customers who are forced to live with constraints. The research implication of the study is the identification of new environment variables which can be taken up for future research. The study contributes to the existing literature that the pandemic has provided an opportunity to entrepreneurs to introspect and develop the spirit of entrepreneurship further. The study concludes entrepreneurship is context driven in the pandemic time. The pandemic time is providing several new opportunities which enable an entrepreneur to identify an innate trait and work upon that trait for improving it further. The means and mechanism needed to maintain the spirit of entrepreneurship is based on the opportunity provided by the pandemic scenario.