3 minutes
In recent years, we have seen governments increasingly focus their efforts on generating economic activity by encouraging entrepreneurship.
By entrepreneurship, we mean business projects and ideas entering the market and facing the challenge of generating profits and becoming formal businesses.
We can distinguish necessity-driven and opportunity-driven entrepreneurship. The former includes ventures aimed at generating income for generally unemployed people; these are characterized by a lack of innovation or being confined to a limited geographical area.
Opportunity-driven entrepreneurship, on the other hand, focuses more on seizing the moment and the doors opened by innovation or by generating solutions to the problems of our time.
Now, firmly in the Digital Age, when technology and communications dominate almost every environment, we find new dimensions in these fields where our ideas can become business opportunities or solutions that positively affect our societies.
Evidence of this phenomenon can be found in Luis Von Anh, a Guatemalan systems engineer who has used brilliant ideas to grow businesses worldwide.
With this in mind, the opportunity to enter entrepreneurship is within everyone's reach through technological tools.
For example, creating mobile applications or online stores expands the market globally, offering the potential to take our ideas to a scale we could not have imagined a few years ago.
Duolingo and reCAPTCHA were created by Luis Von Anh.
Duolingo 
reCAPTCHA
Currently in Guatemala, institutions such as the Ministry of Economy, universities, and even the Ministry of Education, through the productivity course, create initiatives to encourage entrepreneurship through education and training, funds, and competitions that support and advise entrepreneurs.
How do you start a business?
Having an idea is the foundation for entrepreneurship, but what matters is making it a reality. We therefore recommend following these simple steps to gain a clearer idea:
- Define a Business Model. You can use the Canvas methodology.
- Conduct Market Research, using statistics showing market trends, conducting surveys, and determining market size.
- Create prototypes and validate your hypotheses with potential customers, improving your idea through their valuable feedback.
- It is also advisable to find a mentor, an experienced person who helps refine your business model.
- After a planning and validation stage, you can begin to formalize your business and seek financing to make it a reality.
The entrepreneur's path is hard and full of obstacles, but if you persevere and stay disciplined, luck may be on your side.