Entrepreneur

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For the practice of starting a new organization, see Entrepreneurship.
For the computer game by Peter Molyneux, see The Entrepreneur.
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve the article or discuss these issues on the talk page.

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 create and market new goods or services. [1] 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 be 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".[2]

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.

Contents

[edit] Etymology

Credit for coining the word "entrepreneur" goes to Jean-Baptiste Say, a nineteenth century economist.[3]

The word "entrepreneur" 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.

Enterprise is similar to and has roots in, the French word "entreprise," which is the past participle of "entreprendre."

[edit] 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)[4] in his Treatise on Political Economy. "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.

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.[citation needed]

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 role of entrepreneurs in changing business norms.

[edit] Foundations dedicated to entrepreneurship

To date, the largest foundation dedicated to entrepreneurship is the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation[5] based in Kansas City, Missouri.

One of the main entrepreneur associations is the Entrepreneur's Organization.

In Syria, the Syrian Young Entrepreneurs Association tries to help young people become job owners rather than job seekers. It was founded in 2004.

[edit] See also

Sister project Look up entrepreneur in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

 This article includes a list of references or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2008)
  1. ^ Sullivan, arthur; Steven M. Sheffrin (2003). Economics: Principles in action. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458: Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 6. ISBN 0-13-063085-3. http://www.pearsonschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PSZ3R9&PMDbSiteId=2781&PMDbSolutionId=6724&PMDbCategoryId=&PMDbProgramId=12881&level=4. 
  2. ^ Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus, Tim Hindle, The Economist, page 77,
  3. ^ See WILLIAM J. BAUMOL, ROBERT E. LITAN & CARL J. SCHRAMM, GOOD CAPITALISM, BAD CAPITALISM, AND THE ECONOMICS OF GROWTH AND PROSPERITY 3 (2007) (citing generally PETER F. DRUCKER, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP (1985) (attributing coining and defining of “entrepreneur” to JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY, A TREATISE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY (1834)); but see Robert H. Brockhaus, Sr., The Psychology of the Entrepreneur, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP 40 (Calvin A. Kent, et al. eds. 1982) (citing J.S. MILL, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY WITH SOME OF THEIR APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (1848). Note, however, that Drucker's cited book was published in 1986
  4. ^ See WILLIAM J. BAUMOL, ROBERT E. LITAN & CARL J. SCHRAMM, GOOD CAPITALISM, BAD CAPITALISM, AND THE ECONOMICS OF GROWTH AND PROSPERITY 3 (2007) (citing generally PETER F. DRUCKER, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP (1985) (attributing coining and defining of “entrepreneur” to JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY, A TREATISE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY (1834)); but see Robert H. Brockhaus, Sr., The Psychology of the Entrepreneur, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP 40 (Calvin A. Kent, et al. eds. 1982) (citing J.S. MILL, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY WITH SOME OF THEIR APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (1848). Note that, despite Baumol et al.'s citation, the Drucker book was published in 1986.
  5. ^ See http://www.kauffman.org/.
 This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneur"
Personal tools