The “Entrepreneurial Mindset” is a book title, the subject of a few websites and management courses, and a topic that has spawned an uncountable number of talks. To say the least, the “Entrepreneurial Mindset” has established its place in the modern vernacular.
Look up “Entrepreneurial Mindset” in Wikipedia and it redirects to “Entrepreneurship.” The keys to entrepreneurship, as defined in Wikipedia, are, “the quality of being an entrepreneur, i.e. one who "undertakes an enterprise." The term puts emphasis on the risk and effort of individuals who own and manage a business, and on the innovations that result from their pursuit of economic success.”
Business innovation is at the very heart of many online businesses or endeavors. Some of those endeavors lack a business plan, yet have an entrepreneurial spirit, and an understanding that revenues will be the net effect of success.
How does a digital strategy coordinate or resonate with the entrepreneurial mindset? There’s no rule or obligation for one to have or acquire a digital strategy, And yet it would seem all but incumbent upon the modern entrepreneur to have one.
The entrepreneur needs to have more than just a digital strategy. The entrepreneur needs to have a complete digital arsenal at their disposal. In a world with ubiquitous connectivity and the ability to communicate, collaborate, share ideas and take actions at speeds heretofore unimaginable, digital tools are a necessity.
Simple as it may seem, digital basics are critical from Day One: email accounts, perhaps an email server; a site or suite of sites; a cloud entity (which could be as simple as a shared online storage account, as vast as a high volume account with Amazon’s AES); digital backup solutions; firewalls and digital protections against malware and virus attacks; online collaboration tools such as conferencing, video, shared whiteboards and file exchanges. This list just scratches the surface.
The new entrepreneurial mindset takes all of these as a given. If entrepreneurs do not master the skills to execute or operate any of these themselves, they bring in people capable of creating them, implementing them, and using them to optimal benefit. This goes hand in hand with being entrepreneurial: having the ability to lead, motivate, and inspire a sense of loyalty and passion. It takes teams to get things done. The entrepreneur leads the teams. The distributed, non-centralized workplace of the Digital Era means using digital tools to gather and coordinate teams, from across the globe, if need be.
The entrepreneurial mindset welcomes disruptive or “new think” methods. This means never accepting, “it can’t be done” or “it can’t be done that way.” Protective, legacy mindsets would not allow progress. Think of how many businesses, not so very long ago, would not use email. This was primarily due to lawyers’ fears of liability or accountability. But those who embraced it made clear to the rest of the world that this was an obvious evolutionary step in messaging and communications. Entrepreneurs understood this from the get-go.
