The following essay is by Mr Kian Pettit, the secondary-school winner in the Young Business Writers Award, which is sponsored by Ericsson, organised by Dublin City University and sup- ported by The Irish Times.

The term "entrepreneurship" has become very fashionable over the past decade. It is associated with enterprise, small businesses and job creation.

High-profile entrepreneurs such as Richard Branson and Gillian Bowler have become well-known media personalities.

Small business has become an important engine of job creation and the European Union has taken a particular interest in encouraging a higher rate of small business start-ups. The general work climate has become less secure, leading more people to consider the option of self-employed or contract work. Within Ireland, attitudes towards enterprise are changing, and government policy is now geared towards giving more incentives to would-be entrepreneurs.

The term "entrepreneur" has its origins from the French verb entreprendre, meaning to undertake something. Entrepreneurs were viewed as people undertaking risk.

Cantillon (1755), an Irish businessman living in France, was the first economic commentator to identify an entrepreneur as a person who takes on uncertainty in the hope of making a profit. He observed that some traders "buy at a certain price and sell at an uncertain price", and those who cope with this are the true entrepreneurs.

John Stewart Mill (1862) described the entrepreneur as a bearer of risk and supervisor of business enterprise. He introduced the word entrepreneur to the English language, using it to refer to an individual who founded a business. Many studies have tried to analyse the psychological makeup and personality of the entrepreneur. The most widely known psychological theory is that entrepreneurial behaviour is the result of a need for achievement.

In the Irish context, a study by O'Connor and Lyons, contained in the book Modern Management - Theory and Practice for the Irish Student, found that the most common personal traits among the entrepreneurs they surveyed were: a strong self-image, a need for control and independence, a need for achievement, calculated risk-taking and seeing money as a tool to achieve aims rather than an end in itself.

Generally, the entrepreneur has the following distinguishing characteristics: the ability to recognise an opportunity; the ability to marshal resources in response to an opportunity; and the ability to undertake risk, which by its nature implies being willing to live with the consequences of failure.

Dr Michael Smurfit, the highly-respected and highly successful Irish entrepreneur, once said: "I must, I can, and I will." Any other attitude is doomed to instant failure, he said.

Richard Branson is a good example of someone who possesses the above characteristics and is perhaps one of the world's best-known entrepreneurs.

There are two Richard Bransons: the public man is informal, friendly, idealistic, happy-go-lucky, attached to his family, guided by strong principles and concerned to improve the society he lives in.

The private man is a ruthlessly ambitious workaholic, a hard bargainer, an accountant with an instinctive feel for minimising the losses on each new venture, and a gambler who prefers to put his assets at risk every day rather than retire to a life of luxury on what he has already made.

He is an empire-builder who keeps the inner workings of his businesses secret.

And where did it all start? At 44 Albion Street, Shamley Green, Surrey, where a 17-year-old Branson, out of school and looking for something to do, established Student, a student magazine, and his very own record company selling records from the local phonebox. From there, many years of diversification later, he has his millions his mother told him he would get as a child.

I believe that one can be taught the criteria and attitude to be an entrepreneur at any age. Richard Branson's childhood was full of parental observation and in his autobiography he tells us of tests set by his parents even before the age of 12, tests where he was woken early in the morning and told by his mother to cycle to Bournemouth, which was 50 miles away.

Even at the age of four, Branson remembers his mother stopping the car on the way home and telling little Richard to find his own way back through the fields.

On the other hand, Michael Smurfit was taught these essential criteria through his school years and, unlike Branson, Smurfit has three university qualifications.

So it is quite clear to see that one can be taught the necessary information and also one can be taught to adapt to a certain way of thinking and a certain essential attitude.

As Napoleon Hill, author of Think and Grow Rich, said: "If you can conceive it, you can achieve it."