What Is Entrepreneurship?
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| Children's clothing is one product niche for an entrepreneur |
A dictionary definition of entrepreneur is "the organizer or promoter of an activity, especially one who assumes the risks of a business." In practice, entrepreneurship can be
- starting your own business
- inventing something new
- a spirit of creative thinking and innovation that embraces an entire organization.
Entrepreneurs take many paths to many business objectives.
Take a look at this list of entrepreneurship definitions. Note that innovation is part of most of these definitions. Some mention starting a business, but entrepreneurship can be simply a way of thinking and taking action.
Definitions of Entrepreneurship
- "An entrepreneur is a person who is willing to take risks in order to obtain positive results." (Cornell student, 2001)
- "An entrepreneur is one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise." (Cornell student, 2001)
- "Entrepreneurship is being a dare devil businessperson by assuming risks, thinking differently, and distributing resources so as to shake up the market." (Cornell student, 2001)
- "An entrepreneur is a person who has the vision and the drive to overtake and make a project happen." (Cornell student, 2001)
- The role of entrepreneurship is "to assemble and deploy resources in new combinations that disrupt the otherwise static nature of the market." Schumpeter (1934)
- "Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource." (Drucker, 1985).
- "Perceived opportunities are contrived from the entrepreneur’s assessment of the ‘waste’ in existing resource combinations." Kirzner (1973)
- "Entrepreneurship is the process of acquiring, assembling, and deploying resources in the pursuit of perceived opportunities for long-term gain." Bowman & Upton, 1991)
- "Entrepreneurship is the discovery of new combinations of resources under uncertain situations that generate entrepreneurial rent as reward for risk taking." (Rumelt, 1987)
- "A firm-creating entrepreneur creates and perhaps operates a new business firm, while an innovating entrepreneur transforms inventions and ideas into economically viable entities." (Baumol, 1991)
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 "An entrepreneur to me just means someone who thinks out of the box and they're on a different beam. 1 + 1 doesn't equal 2. 1 + 1 equals 5 to them somehow."
Michael Crooke of Patagonia describes what entrepreneurs who innovate by thinking differently contribute to the spirit and success of any good business.
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 "If you're going to do it, do something you love."
Carol Young, the entrepreneurial designer who started [un]designed, makes some recommendations to prospective entrepreneurs, especially those who want to be designers. She continues by explaining that entrepreneurial design businesses usually take some time to establish a valued reputation.
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