The word entrepreneur necessarily suggests an independent business activity by him or her in the pursuit of making profit. The essential criteria for an entrepreneurial activity is that the entrepreneur is the sole owner of the activity with his or her tasks and responsibilities including investing, starting, running, administering and promoting it for further growth. Some of the words related to the term entrepreneur include administrator, contractor, executive, manager, producer, businessperson, founder industrialist, organizer, promoter, undertaker and impresario.
However, none of these words can singly explain the complete purport of entrepreneurial activity since entrepreneur is a highly comprehensive word rich in its meaning. Notably, each of these words suggests a particular dimension of entrepreneurial activity and not all the dimensions at once.
The antonym for the term entrepreneur is ‘employee’. Analysing this word will bring to surface several facts regarding the term entrepreneur. Employee is necessarily a person taking up job in a firm or under an individual. An employee need not invest. He or she does not have much responsibility towards the administration or the success of business. The prime responsibility of an employee is to discharge his or her duties in return to the compensation received by the employer. Looking from this angle, it becomes evident that entrepreneurs perform larger roles than employees. And assume more risks than employees. Entrepreneurial activities necessarily involve risk taking, undertaking huge responsibilities and facing the challenges in course of running the business. All the decisions pertaining to the starting, running and winding up of the given business are under the sole discretion of the entrepreneur.