Entrepreneurship

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Entrepreneurship is the practice of starting new organizations, particularly new businesses generally in response to identified opportunities. Entrepreneurship is often a difficult undertaking, as a majority of new businesses fail. Entrepreneurial activities are substantially different depending on the type of organization that is being started. Entrepreneurship may involve creating many job opportunities.

Many "high-profile" entrepreneurial ventures seek venture capital or angel funding in order to raise capital to build the business. Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs.

Our understanding of entrepreneurship owes a lot to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School of economics. For Schumpeter (1950), an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation. Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and business models and eliminating others. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. Despite Schumpeter's early 20th-century contributions, the traditional microeconomic theory of economics has had little room for entrepreneurs in their theories. (ref. The Economist Magazine, March 11, 2006, pp 67).

Some notable persons and their works in entrepreneurship history.

Conceptual and theoretic developments in entrepreneurship history. Adapted from [Murphy, Liao, & Welsch (2006)]

For Frank H. Knight (1967) and Peter Drucker (1970) entrepreneurship is about taking risk. The behavior of the entrepreneur reflects a kind of person willing to put his career and financial security on the line and take risks in the name of an idea, spending much time as well as capital on an uncertain venture. Still another view of entrepreneurship is that it is the process of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities, which go on to reify themselves in the form of new business ventures. In this model an entrepreneur could be defined as "someone who acts without regard to the resources currently under his control in relentless pursuit of opportunity " (Jeffry Timmons). Pinchot (1985) coined the term Intrapreneurship to describe entrepreneurial-like activities inside organizations and government. The concept is commonly referred to as Corporate Entrepreneurship.

The place of the disharmony-creating and idiosyncratic entrepreneur in traditional economic theory (which describes many efficiency-based ratios assuming uniform outputs) presents theoretic quandaries. William Baumol has added greatly to this area of economic theory and was recently honored for it at the 2006 annual meeting of the American Economic Association. (source: The Economist, March 11, 2006, pp 67)

Howard Stevenson at Harvard University believes that entrepreneurship is the "pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled". Entrepreneurship is widely regarded as an integral player in the business culture of American life. Robert Sobel published The Entrepreneurs: Explorations Within the American Business Tradition in 1974.

the entrepreneur

entrepreneurs have many of the same character traits as leaders. similarly to the early great man theories of leadership, however, trait-based theories of entrepreneurship are increasingly being called into question. entrepreneurs are often contrasted with managers and administrators who are said to be more methodical and less prone to risk-taking. although such person-centric models of entrepreneurship have shown to be of questionable validity, a vast but clearly dated literature studying the entrepreneurial personality found that certain traits seem to be associated with entrepreneurs:

for example, in 1961, david mcclelland described the entrepreneur as primarily motivated by an overwhelming need for achievement and strong urge to build.
collins and moore (1970) studied 150 entrepreneurs and concluded that they are tough, pragmatic people driven by needs of independence and achievement. they seldom are willing to submit to authority.
bird (1992) sees entrepreneurs as mercurial, that is, prone to insights, brainstorms, deceptions, ingeniousness and resourcefulness. they are cunning, opportunistic, creative, and unsentimental.
busenitz and barney (1997) claim entrepreneurs are prone to overconfidence and over generalisations.
according to cole (1959), there are four types of entrepreneur: the innovator, the calculating inventor, the over-optimistic promoter, and the organisation builder. these types are not related to the personality but to the type of opportunity the entrepreneur faces.
burton w. folsom, jr. distinguishes between what he calls a political entrepreneur and a market entrepreneur. the political entrepreneur uses political influences to gain income through subsidies, protectionism, government-granted monopoly, government contracts, or other such favorable arrangements with government(s) (see crony capitalism and corporate welfare). the market entrepreneur operates without special favors from government.

Entrepreneurs can find funding on the Go Big Network (www.goBIGnetwork.com).

Characteristics of entrepreneurship

The entrepreneur, who has a vision and the enthusiasm for this vision, is the driving force of an entrepreneurship.
The vision is usually supported by a set of ideas that have not been awared by the majority of the market/industry.
The overall blueprint to realize the vision is clear, however details may be incomplete, flexible, and evolving.
The entrepreneur promotes the vision with an influential passion.
With a persistent and deterministic mindset, the entrepreneur devises a set of entrepreneurial strategies to thrive for the vision.
The entrepreneur assumes full responsibility for the success or failure of the vision.

The above list presents several ideas as to why someone becomes an entrepreneur, some of which belong to the so-called psychological theories of entrepreneurship, which basically suggests that there are a number of psychological traits possessed by the entrepreneur which allow him or her to undertake such a task. Other points of the list belong to the neoclassical equilibrium theories, that assume that markets are made up of maximising agents (see economics) and that there are no unnoticed business opportunities and that only the people who choose to become entrepreneurs do so - not because the opportunities themselves haven't been noticed by anyone else. The third school of thought is the Austrian theories-school that claims business opportunities arise due to the fact that not everyone has the same amount of information and thus are not equipped to "see" the opportunities. For more about entrepreneurial opportunities from an academic standpoint, see for example the works of Scott A. Shane and Jonathan T. Eckhardt.

Sayed Mahdi Golestan Hashemi (Founder and Head Of Iran Research Center for Creatology :www.creatology-triz.com)Use the term of Entrepronology ,as an interdisciplinary science related to science of Creatology : Science of Creativity and Innovation.

Community entrepreneurship

Community entrepreneurship is entrepreneurial education. Educational systems must be as concerned with family and community health as they are with individual students in classrooms and the health of the educational system itself.

Too often entrepreneurship is seen as the process of finding capable individuals and providing nourishment (venture capital and know-how). Yet we know that some communities are far more successful than others in entrepreneurship and that such communities are also thriving economically even during times of economic downturn (Florida, 2002). We know that there are social entrepreneurs who invent new cultural systems, from the John Muir's work which led to the U.S. Park System to Florence Nightingale's fight for better patient conditions led to the field of nursing. Community entrepreneurship is about applying entrepreneurial principles to the process of creating a community that is highly supportive of entrepreneurship itself, both within classroom walls and without. We need new social entrepreneurs to invent those designs.

Community entrepreneurship seeks answers to related questions and seeks further related questions.

What are the characteristics of communities that best support entrepreneurship? What measurements can we take to better make comparisons? What needs to be done to better address these factors in public school crriculum? How does the need for entrepreneurial inventiveness and creativity get supported with inventive and creative attitudes and skills in the schools? How much of the gifted and talented curriculum agenda is directly related to the needs and skills of entrepreneurs? To what extent does a formal, examination-oriented curriculum militate against entrepreneurship? How does any growth of creativity in the classroom lead to the growth of a creative (entrepreneurial) class? Given the strong digital foundation of the modern economy, how do computer literacy skills contribute? How is the heterarachical decentralized nature of Internet enterprise changing the nature of economic activity? What aspects of this digital economy need digital entrepreneurial skills? How should school curriculum weave computer literacy, creativity and entrepreneurship across the grade levels?

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