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The words entrepreneur, intrapreneur and entrepreneurship have

acquired special significance in the context of economic growth in a
rapidly changing socioeconomic and socio-cultural climates,
particularly in industry, both in developed and developing countries.
Entrepreneurial development is a complex phenomenon.

Entrepreneurship in Global
Perspective

Introduction
The word 'entrepreneur' is derived from the Old French word
'entreprendre' which was first used by the economic 'theorist' Richard
Cantillon in 1755 in an essay where he used this term to describe a
person who assumed the risk of buying goods in the belief that they
could sell them at a higher price at a later time. So, the term in French
was used to describe 'one who undertakes' this particular risk.

Who Is An Entrepreneur?
Entrepreneur Is A Person Who Brings In Change through Innovation For
the Maximum Social Good.
An entrepreneur is a person with a dream, originality and daring, who
acts as the boss, who decides as to how the commercial organization
shall run, who coordinates all activities or other factors of production,
who anticipates the future trend of demand and prices of products.
The entrepreneur displays courage to take risk of putting his money
into an idea, courage to face the competition and courage to take a
leap into unknown future and create new enterprises/ business. This
creative process is the life blood of the strong enterprise that leads to
the growth and contributes to the national development.
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An entrepreneur is one of the important segments of economic growth.

Basically he is a person responsible for setting up a business or an
enterprise. In fact, he is one who has the initiative, skill for innovation
and who looks for high achievements. He is a catalytic agent of change
and works for the good of people. He puts up new green-field projects
that create wealth, open up many employment opportunities and leads
to the growth of other sectors.

Definition of Entrepreneur

According to Oxford Dictionary:

“One who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor – acting as
intermediary between capital and labor”.
1725: Richard Cantillon:
An entrepreneur is a person who pays a certain price for a product to
resell it at an uncertain price, thereby making decisions about
obtaining and using the resources while consequently admitting the
risk of enterprise.
1934: Schumpeter:
According to him entrepreneurs are innovators who use a process of
shattering the status quo of the existing products and services, to set
up new products, new services.
1961: David McClleland:
An entrepreneur is a person with a high need for achievement [N-Ach].
He is energetic and a moderate risk taker.
Peter .P. Drucker:
“Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which
they exploit changes as an opportunity for different business or a
different service”
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1964: Peter Drucker:

“An entrepreneur is one who always searches for change, responds to
it as an opportunity. Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is a specific
instrument of entrepreneurship”.
Walker:
“An entrepreneur is one who is endowed with more than average
capacities in the task of organizing and co-coordinating the various
factors of production. He should be a pioneer, a captain of industry.

The process undertaken by an entrepreneur to augment his business

interests gave birth to “ENTREPRENEURSHIP”.
To put it very simply an entrepreneur is someone who perceives
opportunity, organizes resources needed for exploiting that
opportunity and exploits it.

Examples:
Computers, mobile phones, washing machines, ATMs, Credit Cards,
Courier Service, and Ready to eat Foods are all examples of
entrepreneurial ideas that got converted into products or services.

Entrepreneurship in Pakistani context

Entrepreneurs—people within communities who organize, manage, and

measure the risks of a business or enterprise—are essential to building
the economies of urban and rural areas across the country. Rural areas
conventionally lost their young people to big cities with more career
opportunities. Eventually, the more businesses will create the more
jobs, the more jobs, the better the economy, the better the economy,
that outcome the better our life style.
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The Pakistani state was born out of the partition of India an event that
was characterized by conflict, lasting enmities, a mass migration and
the birth of a theological state. More importantly, the new state of
Pakistan had to deal with an entrenched feudal elite and a largely
migrant professional class borne out of retreating colonial bureaucratic
and military structures. Following the trends of the day, Pakistan also
put in place a planned, closed economy for a big push towards and
industrial take off in its early days of independence. Central planning
quickly assumed the ‘government knows best’ approach and
developed a deep suspicion of the market. The result was a plethora of
legislation put in place for a fully government directed economy.
The military -bureaucratic complex saw itself as the savior of the
country in many different roles: (a) those who had sacrificed for the
new state; (b) the visionary nationalists; (c) the modernizers; and (d)
the ‘deliverers of development’. Contrarily, the professional migrants
were in charge of all the country’s resources and the development
agenda which increasingly demanded a more egalitarian growing
society. The governing elite soon discovered that while direct salary
structures could be compressed to satisfy the egalitarian rhetoric, rent-
seeking activities including direct corruption could enrich them
invisibly. State Owned Enterprises, state led land development,
licenses and controls and development projects were all lucrative
devices for rent-seeking.
The state increasingly moved into developmental functions—
developing infrastructure, providing services, and managing and
curbing markets. This expansion of the state was fuelled by the
growing donor community. The availability of easy financing as well as
expanding control over state resources provided bureaucrats with
incentives to move in the direction of directed development. Given the
resource constraint—both physical and human, the magisterial
functions of government that include law and order, property rights
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and judicial—began to experience a decline. This decline in turn

contributed to the decline in governance and reinforced rent-seeking
and corruption. Rather than entrepreneurship, policy planned for
investors and investments became the norm. Incentives were offered
to attract investment.
Such incentives included licensed monopolies in protected markets,
cheap land and credit and subsidized inputs.
Deep capital controls were adopted along with foreign travel
restrictions ostensibly to conserve foreign exchange. The closed
economy as well as the well-meaning dictates of planning saw financial
repression as an easy means of taxation. In the final analysis, even the
banking system was nationalized so that it could be a full partner in
the planning effort. The beneficiary of the cheap credit was the
investor and the government both of whom found it easy to default.
For political reasons, default was not considered a serious crime hence
increasing the subsidy element to investors.
Since the path to success lay with the state and the state used the
metric of granting favors to confer success, entrepreneurs began to
invest in developing rent-seeking networks with key government
officials at the center. This is now the dominant regime of business
operation in the country. This did not allow for the development of
entrepreneurship in the sense that modern economics and business
has come to know—an innovator, a risk-taker, and a builder.
Instead, the incentive regime has created a rent-seeking businessman
used to gaming and (mis)using policy. These new classes of
businessmen that acquired wealth and learnt ways to manipulate
policy are now dominant. As a result, wealth remained concentrated in
the hands of those that the government favored. Consequently, even
in private enterprise, merit gave way to government discretion. This
environment slowed the growth of entrepreneurship and indigenous
enterprise.
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Rent-seeking is defined as a situation in which an individual or firm

makes money by manipulating economic environment rather than by
profit making through trade and production of wealth.

Development of Entrepreneurship in
Pakistan
In Pakistan, policy has always been biased towards the elite. This is
especially true of the economic policy which has been biased towards
the large scale sector. The result is that this sector has developed on
the incentives of rent-seeking rather than entrepreneurship. The
development of small scale sector to some extent reflects the
characteristics of entrepreneurship however this sector has largely
grown up as an informal sector continually besieged by the state in its
quest to protect its favorite child the large formal sector. Below we will
attempt to understand the historical tension between rent-seeking and
entrepreneurship in Pakistan.
a) The Big Push for industry
b) The Neglect of the “Small”
c) Agriculture and the Elite bias
d) Subsidies for Export

a) The Big Push for Industry

 ‘Enterprise’ for the government was synonymous to large
industry only
 Policy measures gave rise to rent seekers instead of
entrepreneurs
 Government policy was never neutral and favored
industrialization through out (Stephen 1969 & Hussain 1999)
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This resulted in losses on bad loans for banks to the extent that, for
example, governments had to inject equity of RS.20 billion and RS.7
billion into United Bank Limited (UBL) and Habib Bank limited (HBL)
respectively to make these viable for privatization that took place in
recent past.
1977-88: Zia years of encouragement of private sector, preference still
given to large scale sector.

b) Neglect of the ‘Small’

 Small scale manufacturing sector developed in the context of a
difficult / biased industrialization process
 Reality: Informal and Small scale sector dominate our lives.
 Today almost 40% of business takes place in the informal sector
 Small scale sector is the breeding ground for innovation but
continues to attract little research

c) Agriculture & the Elite bias

 Impressive agricultural 1960 and 1970 ( green revolution)
 The main elements of the green revolution were: tube wells,
characterization and High Yield varieties (HYV) - all the three
elements have been a source of rent seeking
 ADB, followed a liberal credit policy and made numerous loans to
farmers (cheap availability of credit)
 Overvalued exchange rate made tractors available in Pakistan at
below world market prices
 HYV of food grains were provided to farmers at subsidized prices
 Akmal Hussain, “The new technology made it possible to
accelerate agricultural growth substantially through an elite
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farmer strategy” which concentrated on the new inputs on large

farms only.

d) Subsidies for Exports

 In 1960s, the dual exchange rate system was used to subsidize
machinery imports and penalize consumer imports while offering
a large subsidy to exporters.
 This policy again favored large scale industrialist and exporters
at the expense of small scale producers
 Businesses have grown on the back of various protective
measure that had a tilt towards rent-seeking rather than welfare
improvement.
 Protections available to businessmen reduced their risks

Conclusion:
Current Scenario:
Entrepreneurship is stifled because of rent seeking.
If entrepreneurship is to develop, deep government reform is needed
which limits rent seeking, encourages innovation and fosters enterprise
The following is recommended:

 Reinventing the Role of Government

 Removing Instruments of Rent seeking
 A new Growth Strategy
 Building Growth Cities
 Identifying ‘Lemons’
 Releasing the energy of the domestic Sector
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The Entrepreneurial Process

The entrepreneurial process involves all the functions, activities, and
actions associated with perceiving opportunities and creating
organizations to pursue them.
A wide range of factors, in Pakistani context, could influence someone
to become an entrepreneur, including environmental, social, personal
ones, or a combination of them.

After one decides to be an entrepreneur, there are four steps of the

entrepreneurial process he/she has to follow:
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 Spot and assess the opportunity.

 Draw up a business plan.
 Establish the resources needed and get them.
 Run the company created.

Spot and assess the opportunity:

To identify an opportunity and analyze its potential in terms of: market
needs, competitors and market potential and product lifecycle. It is
important the entrepreneur to test his/her business idea/concept with
potential customers, asking if they would buy the product or service,
doing some research to find the market size and whether if it is
growing, stable or stagnating, finding out about his/her competitors
strengths and weaknesses, threats and opportunities.

Draw up the business plan:

The business plan is an important part of the entrepreneurial process.
A well planned business will have more chance to succeed all the other
aspects of the company being equal. It is crucial for the entrepreneur
to know how to plan his/her actions and lay out strategies for the
business to be created or under expansion.

Establish the resources needed and provide them:

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The entrepreneur should use his/her planning ability and bargaining

skills to get to know the best alternatives on the financing market for
their business, that is, which will offer the best cost benefit ratio.

Run the firm created:

Running the company can seem to be the easiest part of the
entrepreneurial process, since the opportunity has been identified, the
business plan developed and the source of funding provided. But
running a company is not as straightforward as it seems. The
entrepreneur must recognize his/her limitations, recruit a first rate
team to help manage the company, implementing actions to minimize
problems and maximize profits. That is, the firm has to produce more,
with the fewest resources possible, combining efficiency and efficacy.
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Case Studies

Netsol Technologies - Achievements

of Flourished Entrepreneur
NetSol Technologies, Inc. was founded in the year 1995. Salim Ghauri
is the President of NetSol Technologies, Inc. and the founder & CEO of
Network Solutions (Pvt.) Ltd. Lahore, Pakistan, (a wholly-owned
subsidiary of NetSol Technologies, Inc.) He has been a software
developer since the early 1980s, and between 1981 and 1995, he
designed and developed financial applications for large size databases.
Having started out with humble beginnings in the city of Lahore, NetSol
soon grew to a sizable business having operations in Australia, China,
Pakistan, Thailand, UK, and a headquarters in California, USA.

Before establishing Network Solutions, Mr. Ghauri was a successful IT

consultant in Australia. His last assignment was with BHP Steel in
Sydney. As a system integrator he was responsible for software and
hardware solutions. His main achievement was the introduction of a
PC-based network in BHP Steel. From 1988-89, Mr. Ghauri consulted
with the State Rail Authority of NSW Australia for its MIS reporting
Before moving to Australia, he was in Saudi Arabia, where he started
his IT career at Citibank, Riyadh in 1979. After leaving Citibank, he
started his first venture with the help of local funding. Mr. Ghauri is
credited with setting up the first IT-based training institute and a
software house in Damam, Saudi Arabia.
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His basic education is in computing. He got his petroleum engineering

in 1977. But he pursued computing because one of my subjects in
petroleum engineering was FORTRAN language and he had developed
flair of computing. His career started in 1979 with City Bank in Saudi
Arabia in its IT department. From 1979 to 2004, He’ve been living his
life in the kingdom of IT. He worked for City Bank for 5 years and in
1986 he moved to Australia as an IT consultant till 1995. After that he
came to Pakistan to establish an IT consortium here.
Salim Ghauri started business in 1996, it was the time when IT was the
most talked issue and Salim Ghauri was able to get in to business
quickly. But besides being lucky, his people worked really hard. Once
Salim Ghauri got the business from overseas he worked hard and
delivered the quality product in time.

As far as his achievements are concerned, he has developed a financial

application that caters leasing businesses. Only a few companies in the
world have developed such applications. At the moment His product is
running in 9 countries like Australia, Japan, Thailand & Korea etc.
These are not commercial countries for Pakistan. Most Pakistani
companies work for USA and Europe but NetSol has focused on Asia
Pacific Region.
In 1996 NetSol got its big break, when it was awarded a major
offshore contract with Mercedes Benz Thailand, many more such
contracts were to follow. Focusing on quality NetSol went on to attain
the ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 certifications in 1998 and 2008
respectively, and in 2006 it achieved CMMI Level 5 certification, a
distinction shared by fewer than 100 companies worldwide. NetSol was
also the first US Company to dual list on both the NASDAQ Capital
Market and the Dubai International Financial Exchange DIFX, which
became NASDAQ Dubai in 2008.
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Main customers of NetSol Technologies are in Japan, Korea, Taiwan,

Thailand and Singapore etc. One of the best achievements of NetSol
includes is that they are focusing different areas in the world apart
from USA and Europe. They are also in North America. NetSol
Technologies have a company that is based in USA where they are
training professionals.
Another aspect is of the quality NetSol Technologies offers and they
are dominating the market in Pakistan as far as quality is concerned. It
is their belief that if they want to compete with the world (including
India and China), they need to focus and have the edge if they want to
get the business. They have developed a very structured approach to
do business.

Evaluation:
NetSol Technologies is a multinational also opertating in Pakistan. It is
categorized as flourished business now due to Saleem Ghauri who has
started the journey in IT sector during 70s and due to his untiring
efforts now it is among the most established IT firms in Pakistan. He
has worked abroad in many counties of Asia and Europe and now
working in Pakistan. His major achievement is Financial applications in
leasing business that is operating in 9 countries . Ghauri’s achievement
have made him a role model for all those who belong to IT sector in
Pakistan and abroad.
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Najam Kidwai-A famous Entrepreneur

in IT sector (Achievements of
Florushing Entreprenur)

Najam Kidwai was born in Bradford, England. Being a young Asian in

England was hard in the 70’s and 80’s. His parents used to say that to
progress in life you have to have a decent education. Najam kidwai
was always interested in technology. The idea was to build technology,
to create technology, and to understand technology. The only way to
do that was by going thru university. So he went to university. He
earned a degree in technology management and then opted for
masters in business innovation.
Najam Kidwai has a BSc (Hons) in Technology Management, an MSc in
Business Innovation and is 34 years old. Najam Kidwai is a frequent
speaker on technology issues and has presented at many global
technology and venture capital conferences.

He built a company called CyberEye, which was a virtual reality

company, developing software for medical market in 1992-93. Then he
setup an offshore development team in Pune, just outside Bombay. It
was very early off shore. He raised $8 million in financing when he was
23 years, which he think is a pretty good achievement. he lost lots of
money in America raising my funds but he managed to get them back.
Najam Kidwai had lots of publicity on BBC, 60 minutes, FT, etc.

People read all these stories and gave him money. So from there,
basically for last 8 to 10 years, he have been involved in some best
online projects in world, one is egg.com which is world’s largest online
bank with market capitalization of $1.6 billion. he was also involved in
ESI, which is British online firm which was purchased by E*Trade. he
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also built and sold two consulting companies. Najam Kidwai built a
portal in 9 different languages. It was a voice portal with very
innovative technology. He have raised lots of VC funding. He have
done lots of work in States by bringing US technology companies in
Europe & South East Asia. Currently Najam Kidwai is in process of
raising a $20M Venture Capital fund in Pakistan to invest in technology
companies in Pakistan. It is a venture capital fund focused on early
stage technology investing, which will be raised in Pakistan. If a
person/company has good ideas, like if he’s setting up a Dot Com
company, they would help them by giving money to develop the
project to completion. More importantly they have a world class in-
house consulting capability (with consultants from the likes of
McKinsey, Accenture, Booze Allen etc.) that will help the entrepreneurs
execute. So the idea is to create jobs and wealth in Pakistan & create a
supportive environment for Pakistani entrepreneurs. His focus would
be on medical devices, wireless technologies, networking and
enterprise software.

Najam Kidwai, is a young and vibrant personality and also a very

successful businessman and entrepreneur. He is currently raising an
early stage technology venture capital fund in Pakistan, called Clever
Thinking Ventures, which will be a $20M fund focused on making early
stage investments in the enterprise software, medical devices,
networking and wireless technologies.

Previously he has held a variety of roles such as CEO, VP, Director &
General Manager with a sales focus and has built and launched a
+number of UK & US based technology companies in Europe and South
East Asia. Najam has extensive experience in emerging technologies,
specifically, wireless, CRM, Outsourcing iTV, enterprise software and
natural-language.
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Najam has raised over $55M in VC funds to date and has built and sold
two technologies/consulting companies for millions of dollars.

Najam was also heavily involved in the development of the first online
funds supermarket of -www.egg.com (most successful online bank in
the world) Egg.com is an online bank, which was created in 1997. They
decided they wanted to make an online bank with no physical
branches. People could deposit their money here and get a very high
interest rate. That was incredibly successful although it cost them a lot
of money to build it. They had a five year business plan to get 1 million
customers. Then they launched an online credit card and within two
years they had 3 and a half million customers. Reason for success was
that everything you got charged on credit card, you got 2% cash back.
You also had 6 months interest free credit.

Previously (1999 – 2002), a co-founder of AtomicTangerine (a Venture

Consultancy and SRI International spin-off), Najam Kidwai led
AtomicTangerine’s Commercialization practice and was responsible for
taking the intellectual property from partner labs (SRI, Sarnoff, KRDL
and alliances) and promising new business opportunities resulting in
licensing the technology or creating new ventures to capitalize on the
IP created.

Najam Kidwai has been involved with many award-winning online

businesses such as ESI (E*Trade UK) and Egg. In 2000/1, Najam Kidwai
was instrumental in founding and building AtomicTangerine’s European
operations, revenue ($10,000,000+ in UK).

As of December 2001, Atomic Tangerine was acquired by RedSiren

Technologies (www.redsiren.com). In June 2001, Najam Kidwai was
responsible for facilitating and structuring the acquisition by BSG PLC
of AtomicTangerine’s Experience Design Business.
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Najam Kidwai currently sits on the boards, as an advisor to

www.primetext.co.uk,
www.rockingfrog.com,www.ambientdevices.com,www.chicago.com
and Epigraph Inc. Najam Kidwai is a member of the Institute of
Directors, the British Computer Society and the Electronic Commerce
Association.

Evaluation:
Najam kidwai is a famous entrepreneur in IT sector who has been
categorized in the flourishing businessman. His achievements start
from small virtual eye company to currently serving as advisor in
British computer society and Electronic Commerce Association.

yellO.pk: Achievements of Emerging

Entrepreneur)
Just out of Beta mode in September 2009 and already with a user base
of 40,000 unique users monthly, YellO.pk is the brainchild of Samir
Feroze also known as ‘Chief Yeller’. He describes yellO as a place for
you to discover everything you want to know about your city in
Pakistan.

YellO is a map-based location platform which lets you discover local

events, business reviews, classified ads and blogs. Due to this, it is fast
becoming a platform for positive social activism, a hub for finding local
events and a place to discover local business reviews. The content is
all user-generated ensuring that everything is open, honest and
transparent about things going on around the city.

The seeds for yello had been germinating in Feroze’ mind from as far
back as 2006. However, it was only in 2008 that he managed to start
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his research and development on the platform. Starting off with a

couple of software engineers, today the team comprises about 40
people and two offices in Karachi and Lahore.

In the limited time, yellO has been active; it has been used to mark
collection points around Pakistan for the ‘Swat relief fund’ and
highlighted the amazing efforts by ordinary citizens in Pakistan, like
the founders of ‘The Rozgar scheme’, which gives microcredit to the
poorest sections of the population.
Feroze says, “We had always wanted a platform to highlight the
amazing things happening around us which often get overlooked. The
fact that the information in yellO is user-generated means we get to
discover much more through yellO than through traditional media.”
The future is rich and profitable as yellO enters multiple mobile
platforms, better web interfaces, a magazine and seamless SMS
integration.

Evaluation:
Samir Feroze is a young emerging entrepreneur in the IT world who
has started its virtual platform “yellO.pk” in 2008. Now this website is
emerging as a platform for information seekers that contains every
interesting thing happening around in your cities that has provided it
opportunities to grow and making it even more profitable business,
increasing its consumer base and now it has established two offices in
Karachi and Lahore.

These individuals and companies also motivate us by showing that we

can compete successfully in this new business world with people twice
our age and companies only God-knows-how-many-times-as big. With
the world’s industries and markets in constant shift, there is perhaps
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no better time to take risks especially when it comes to making choices

in the new digital world.
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Introduction........................................................................................................................1
Who Is An Entrepreneur?................................................................................................1
Development of Entrepreneurship in Pakistan...............................................................6
The Entrepreneurial Process............................................................................................9
Case Studies......................................................................................................................12
Netsol Technologies - Achievements of Flourished Entrepreneur..............................12
Najam Kidwai-A famous Entrepreneur in IT sector (Achievements of Florushing
Entreprenur)
...........................................................................................................................................15

yellO.pk: Achievements of Emerging Entrepreneur)...................................................18