Entrepreneur And Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper traces the historical concept of entrepreneurship to the formal work of Schumpeter. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the formation of entrepreneurship, its development, and transformation into a formal corporate business. We assert that an entrepreneur is one who pays know cost in order to produce income that is uncertain and unfixed. Both uncertainty and unfixed income entails risk; thus, entrepreneurs are commonly called risk takers. However, to limit the definition of entrepreneur to risk taking is incorrect because an entrepreneur truly is someone who defines and redefines, by means of innovation, factors of production and market for consumption. Viewing entrepreneurship in an organizational developmental context, successful entrepreneur builds the enterprise into a family business. Success family business builds itself into a firm, and ultimately formalizes itself into a corporation. The structural formality of the corporate structure sometimes deters entrepreneurs to grow beyond a family business. This is the reason why a family business stays within the family. The entrepreneurial spirit in the individual does not die, and it refuses to succumb to the organizational structure and its structural constraint. An organization that allows the individual free spirit to roam free tends to maintain its competitive edge by effectively combining the benefits of a formal structure, i.e. credibility and access to finance in the formal economy, with the free spirit of the entrepreneur CEO.

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