Entrepreneurs: Drivers of Economic Change
11 Pages Posted: 23 Sep 2010
Date Written: September 23, 2010
Abstract
In today’s ‘celebratory culture’ there is a tendency to mythologise people who have succeeded in business, particularly where new technologies are involved. This clouds our understanding of entrepreneurship as a vital economic process whereby at a particular point in time certain individuals harness exogenous change to create new economic value in society. The purpose of this note is re-establish the role of the entrepreneur as the driver of capitalist process, progress and globalisation of markets. We suggest that it is more useful to see entrepreneurship as a function and the entrepreneur as (1) a specialist intermediary between external opportunities and factors of production; (2) an agent of broad-based economic change that shapes society, and (3) a technological ‘system-builder’. In this note we discuss the differences between entrepreneurs and small business owners, entrepreneurs and managers, and entrepreneurship, innovation and strategy. We then discuss entrepreneurship in the context of established firms.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship, Economic change, Schumpeterian entrepreneur
JEL Classification: L26
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation