Innovative entrepreneurship in ELT

Abstract

Entrepreneurs are considered essential for a market economy since they supply the goods or services that people are willing to pay for (Idzikowski, 2019). With the global ELT industry expanding rapidly, there are thousands of private language schools and other kinds of ELT businesses, with new ones opening every year. While some of these new ventures will achieve success and sustainable growth, others will fold. In some cases, the reason why they will go bust is that their founders’ plans have exclusively focused on potential financial returns rather than on what makes the services offered by their ELT businesses distinctly valuable in the eyes of their clients. Given how crowded the market is, any prospective entrepreneur wishing to operate in the international ELT sector needs to think long and hard about how to offer a service that is recognisably innovative and how to position themselves as innovative entrepreneurs.