The Concept of Entrepreneurship

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The Concept of Entrepreneurship

The entrepreneur is our visionary, the creator in each of us. We're born with that quality and it defines our lives as we respond to what we see, hear, feel, and experience. It is developed, nurtured, and given space to flourish or is squelched, thwarted, without air or stimulation, and dies.

Michael Gerber

The term 'entrepreneur' has been around since the seventeenth-century, it originates from France, where the phrase “entreprendre” was first used when a Frenchmen ‘entered and took charge’ of royal contracts. It was used widely to describe a person who lead a project which would deliver valuable benefits and bring it to completion, a person who can manage uncertainty and bring success in the face of challenges that would destroy a less well managed venture.

In this early 19th century this description was altered by the French economist J. B. Say who instead focused on the business process rather than the practitioner. He said that an entrepreneur shifts economic resources out of an area of lower productivity and into one of higher productivity and greater yield. 200 years later confusion still remains over the definitions of ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘entrepreneurship' with no single definition existing.

Further examples back up this point. In 'Advanced Entrepreneurship' by H. Rwigema and R. Venter the term is described as “... a process of conceptualising, organising, launching and – through innovation – nurturing a business opportunity into a potentially high growth venture in a complex, unstable environment”.

Meanwhile Scott Shane in 'General Theory of Entrepreneurship' believes "Entrepreneurship is an activity that involves the discovery, evaluation and exploitation of opportunities to introduce new goods and services, ways of organising, markets, processes, and raw materials through organising efforts that previously not existed." (Shane, S. 2003)

In fact, the variations are almost endless: "Entrepreneurship is the act of forming a new organisation of value" (Bateman& Snell 1996), "... the creation of new enterprise" (Bartol & Martin 1998) or "...the process of creating something new with value by devoting the necessary time and effort, assuming the accompanying financial, and receiving the resulting rewards of monetary and personal satisfaction and independence." (Hisrich & Peters 1998)

Consequently, we can say with certainty that entrepreneurship is at best ambiguous and at worst a wildly theoretical concept but we believe the best definition comes from Peter Kilby – as noted by Wickham (1998). He says the entrepreneur has a lot in common with the 'Heffalump', a fictional animal in A.

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