Exploring the importance of Entrepreneurship in Tourism; Illumination of Different Aspects

over the past few years, the tourism industry has come to be recognized as a way of providing strategic support for sustainable local business development and has the potential to empower communities. Understanding tourists and tourism processes is the first stage to empowering the local community to make informed and appropriate decisions about their tourism development. Considerable investments are required in communication and trust building between the actors in tourism. In this context to make successful development of tourism is necessary to understand the importance of entrepreneurship. There has been an ongoing debate in the academic literature and considerable differences of opinion, about the best theoretical approach to the study of entrepreneurship. Researchers and writers have approached the subject from a variety of approaches including psychological, sociological, economic, and anthropological. Given the fact that entrepreneurs are so very different, it is not surprising that overall conclusions about them are so difficult to draw. However this has not prevented an ongoing search for an entrepreneurial blueprint. Research indicated that compared to most other developing economies, Iran channels far too little resources into its small, micro and medium enterprises (SMME’s). This leads to a situation where growth of entrepreneurship is slow and not properly organized. Tourism was identified by government and the private sector as a vehicle to facilitate growth in the Iran economy. One of the aspects that has been highlighted was the development of entrepreneurs in the tourism industry. Tourism was chosen because it impacts on basically all other sectors of the economy and shows a steady growth and creates many employment opportunities. In this regard, presenting paper is to provide new insights into the nature of tourism entrepreneurship thereby addressing main characteristics of different dimensions of entrepreneurship in Iran tourism industry. In this article we discuss the concept of entrepreneurship in connection with tourism and looking at its significance in its relationship with local business development. Finally, we will identify the major opportunities and problems to the growth of Iran tourism entrepreneurship and will also present some solutions.

Keywords:

Entrepreneurship , Tourism , Business Development , SMME