An
entrepreneur is a person who has possession of an
enterprise, or
venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. It is an ambitious leader who combines land, labor, and capital to often create and market new goods or services. ...
The term is 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, believed to have coined the word Entrepreneur first in about at 1800. He said an entrepreneur is "one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as intermediatory between capital and labour".
Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, resulting in many new ventures failing. The word entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist currently. Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and exploit it by organizing their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions within a given sector.
Observers see them as being willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial
risk to pursue
opportunity.
Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the
capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either "
political entrepreneurs" or "market entrepreneurs," while
social entrepreneurs' principal objectives include the creation of a social and/or environmental benefit.
Etymology
Credit for coining the word "entrepreneur" goes to Jean-Baptiste Say, a nineteenth century economist.
The word "entrepreneur" (f. entrepreneuse) is a loanword from French. In French the verb "entreprendre" means "to undertake," with "entre" coming from the Latin word meaning "between," and "prendre" meaning "to take." In French a person who performs a verb, has the ending of the verb changed to "eur," comparable to the "er" ending in English. "Unternehmer" (lit. "undertaker" in the literal sense of the word) is the high German equivalent and curiously, "Unternehmensforschung" is the German equivalent of
Operations Research although the Anglo-Saxon model of the firm is fairly anti-thetical to the notion of management as a science.
Entrepreneur as a leader
Scholar
Robert. B. Reich considers leadership, management ability, and
team-building as essential qualities of an entrepreneur. This concept has its origins in the work of
Richard Cantillon in his
Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (1755) and
Jean-Baptiste Say (1803 or 1834) in his
Treatise on Political Economy.
A more generally held theory is that entrepreneurs emerge from the population on demand, from the combination of opportunities and people well-positioned to take advantage of them. An entrepreneur may perceive that they are among the few to recognize or be able to solve a problem. In this view, one studies on one side the distribution of information available to would-be entrepreneurs (see
Austrian School economics) and on the other, how environmental factors (access to capital, competition, etc.) change the rate of a society's production of entrepreneurs.
A prominent theorist of the Austrian School in this regard is
Joseph Schumpeter, who saw the entrepreneur as innovators and popularized the uses of the phrase
creative destruction to describe his view of the role of entrepreneurs in changing business norms.
See also
