WELCOME to a new column giving insights into the thoughts and actions of a business creator. He is MARK FORDYCE, whose expertise in media, technology and entertainment has helped to spawn a thriving economic platform for the City of York.

He is chairman of Creation Network, York and North Yorkshire's convergent media network, a member of the eScience committee for Science City York, and on the digital steering group for Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency. As chairman of York Data Services, which specialises in networking and data centre solutions, he helped his company to win a £1 million three-year contract to supply and manage IT services to companies within the new 35,000sq ft IT Centre at York Science Park. Pop fans of the 1980s will remember Mark as drummer in The Mood, the York-based group signed up by RCA records. Today he is also managing director of Sugarstar Ltd, which provides music for the film, television, new media and games industries. He provided the title song for the video game, Broken Sword - Sleeping Dragon by York-based Revolution Software.

ENTREPRENEUR is a word as hard to define as it is to spell, especially for me who, for reasons I'll explain later, has to rely heavily on a word processor spellchecker.

It's a glamorous, exciting word, conjuring aspirational visions of an inconceivably young individual making a zillion by floating his/her internet company.

And to think... the bright-eyed whiz-kid conceived and ran the breakthrough product from a bedroom/garage in a mock Tudor house owned by his or her parents in Basildon, etc.

The Oxford English Dictionary, for all its accuracy, gives a seemingly less sensational, even dour definition of an entrepreneur as "a person who undertakes an enterprise or business with a chance of making a profit or loss".

Think about the uncertainty that implies. There's a chance you'll make a loss too.

We all have to take a leap of faith now and again and run the risk of failure, but an entrepreneur - sadly, more often male than female - will climb higher than is sensible in order to hurl himself off, knowing that he might fall on his face and everyone will be watching.

He knows everyone will be watching, because he invited everyone to the show!

And when he does bomb out (which he will because it's all part of the process) he gets up, dusts himself down and starts to calculate how, when and where he can do it again, only next time a bit higher, a bit further (or even a lot higher and further).

This is why I truly believe you can't teach someone to be an entrepreneur, any more than you can teach someone to dream.

It is not only about making money, but more about translating ideas into action, spotting a gap in the market, running it, being extremely tenacious and having the determination to turn it into reality, even when all around you think you are plainly mad.

Entrepreneurs are rarely satisfied, being driven by an innate need to be innovative and to share their vision. It is the whole journey which is so vital, not just the sense of achievement as your "baby" turns into something workable.

That baby has yet to roam the playground, seeking and testing out countless ideas, honing those deal-making skills on its way to the real world.

It's no coincidence that entrepreneurs are often highly creative yet under-achievers academically, frequently suffering some form of dyslexia.

So would I describe myself as an entrepreneur? Oh, I'm just someone with no O-levels who likes to flamboyantly "jump off" higher and further. And, as I said, I'm also someone who finds the word entrepreneur very hard to spell.

Updated: 09:49 Wednesday, February 04, 2004