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Entepreneurs |
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An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist is believed to have coined the word "entrepreneur" first in about 1800. He said an entrepreneur is "one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as intermediatory between capital and labour.
Research into entrepreneurs Schumpeter argues that the entrepreneur is an innovator, one that introduces new technologies into the workplace or market, increasing efficiency, productivity or generating new products or services (Deakins and Freel 2009). Other academics such as Say, Casson and Cantillon, say the entrepreneur is an organiser of factors or production that acts as a catalyst for economic change (Deakins and Freel, 2009). Shackle argues that the entrepreneur is a highly creative individual that imagines new solutions providing new opportunities for reward (Deakins and Freel, 2009). These are a few definitions from the entrepreneurship field but show the complexity and lack of cohesion between academic research (Gartner, 2001). Most research focuses on the traits of the entrepreneur. Cope (2001) argues that although certain entrepreneurial traits are required the entrepreneurs behaviour are dynamic and influenced by environmental factors. There is a growing body of work that shows that entrepreneurial behavior is dependent on social and economic factors. The research into female entrepreneurs illustrates this quite clearly. "Countries which have healthy and diversified labor markets or stronger safety nets show a more favorable ratio of opportunity to necessity-driven women entrepreneurs." (Minitti, 2010) What those factors are varies widely, based on local needs. In Somalia, this may be bigger crops or clean water while in the US, technology seems to be the driving factor. New research regarding the qualities required for successful entrepreneurship is ongoing, with notable work from the Kaufmann Institute forming the statistical basis for much of it. Research from Scott A. Shane (2008)[3] summarizes much of the counter-intuitive conclusions of this research while Adrian Perez's research on success attributes for co-founder teams is ongoing.
Social Entrepreneur |