Do you have an idea, a team (or both) and are thinking about launching a company? This is a tough, high-risk career pursuit and not for the faint of heart. It’s about studying your potential market and customers, refining your idea, forging plans that will inevitably need to change, building a team that can survive, raising funds, and getting it off the ground. You’ll most likely have to self-finance for some time, or try to make this happen in parallel with a full- or part-time job.

Being an entrepreneur via a startup isn’t the only way to get into the game. If you're interested in the electricity of being involved in something young, vibrant and even wild—but you also like the idea of stability and a consistent paycheck—then you might consider the world of scale-ups. These are early-stage companies that have traction, have secured funding, and are starting to ramp up their growth. The founders and funders are looking for talent who can make big contributions to helping them scale. If you have a lot of grit and an entrepreneurial spirit—but don’t want to start a company yourself—then targeting a scale-up might be a good option for you in the next steps of your career.

Individual entrepreneurs aren’t the only people who generate innovative ideas and build businesses.  Increasingly, big companies do it too. Leveraging their assets, know-how and talent, corporations are starting to become adept at sensing opportunities and capturing them. This happens in two primary ways: innovation units within companies identify opportunities to drive new products, services and business models, or make changes to existing ones, and work within the existing corporate structure to turn these ideas into reality: “venture building” units within companies are spinning out startups to bring innovations to reality outside the company as new ventures.