Entrepreneurial Competency And Entrepreneurial Success: A Conceptual And Empirical Review

Abstract

Entrepreneurial competency consists of specific skills, knowledge and abilities require by entrepreneur to start and manage an enterprise successfully. It consists of both the technical and management components. The skills and knowledge constitute the technical or the hardware component of entrepreneurial competency while management component could be described as the software aspect of entrepreneurial competency needed by the entrepreneur to function well in hardware functions.   To ensure entrepreneurial success, entrepreneur must acquire the needed competencies which could be through training, education or hands-on experience. The purpose of this paper is carry out conceptual and empirical review on entrepreneurial competency and entrepreneurial success to provide a deeper understanding of the concepts and provide research direction to researchers most especially at this time of global inflation when small and medium businesses are finding it difficult to survive. Therefore, the paper provides a detailed review of the concepts of entrepreneurial competency and entrepreneurial success. Also, empirical review on the effect of entrepreneurial competency on entrepreneurial success and four measures of success namely profitability, sales growth, customer satisfaction and competitiveness are presented in this paper. The paper recommends that researchers should focus more attention on studying various dimensions of entrepreneurial competency to examine their effects on both financial and non financial measures of entrepreneurial success.