Theories Of Entrepreneurship

Bygrave, W.D. & Zacharakis, A. (2014). Entrepreneurship, 3rd ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN: 978-1-118-58289-3

Definitions of entrepreneurship almost always involve the risk taking within the business world. Businessdictionary.com states “The capacity and willingness to develop, organize and manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit.” Why we want individuals to create new companies or even to grow products and ideas within an existing company is beyond the scope of this paper be we are going to assume that over all the outcome of this behavior is good for the organization, community, or country. There is little dispute that the United States was known for this behavior over the last two hundred years and it may be something that we are starting to lose. At least it is a behavior that we want to continue to foster.

Psychological theory has been used to better understand an individual’s willingness and ability to become a successful entrepreneur in society. It is widely recognised that entrepreneurs are a major source of economic growth and financial benefit for society; as such it is useful to understand the psychological traits and drivers behind a successful entrepreneur to encourage more people to become entrepreneurs for the benefit of society. There are two major psychological theories that are useful and also criticised in the understanding of entrepreneurship; these are the trait approach and the cognitive approach.

The existing literature on entrepreneurship stems from economical conceptual frameworks developed in the early twentieth century by Schumpeter, Cole, Kirzner among others. Fayolle (2014) notes that entrepreneurship has gained considerable study

Entrepreneurship involves entrepreneurial skills to develop, organize and manage a business venture by focussing on opportunities along with any of its risks in order to make a profit. Entrepreneurship is also an approach to management that can be applied in start-up situations as well as within established businesses. (Business Management: a contemporary compilation)

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. © Peter Drucker.

Entrepreneurship is difficult to define throughout its history research. Even nowadays, this concept is still a debatable point (Rajendra, et al., 2017). Based on four decades of research, Gartner (1988) concludes that entrepreneurs are founders of new firms. Shane and Venkataraman (2000) consider entrepreneurship as “a new venture’s risk-taking endeavor seeking an opportunity” and Fortunato (2014) adds innovative value into the concept of entrepreneurship. Thus, research on the definition of entrepreneurship continue. According to those diverse views, I will interpret six unique entrepreneurial characteristics and theoretically analyze each one. Risk taker, need for achievement and proactivity as my strengthens will be illustrated with my experience. Innovativeness, internal locus of control and tolerance for ambiguity are my weaknesses, thus I will describe relevant successful Entrepreneurs’ experiences.

This chapter assesses the different literatures written in the areas of entrepreneurship, women entrepreneurs, women entrepreneurs in SMEs, Women entrepreneurs in SMEs in Mauritius, the factors influencing the performance of women entrepreneurs in SMEs and the supports given by institutions to SMEs.

Israel Kirzner and Joseph Schumpeter were both great theorists known for their different views on entrepereneusrship.in this essay we are comparing and contrasting the theories of both Schumpeter and Kirzner, and we are also going to determine whether their arguments are right and get further insights on entrepreneurship as described by the two theorists.

Beside Schumpeterian entrepreneurship theory, William Baumol (1990) also gave us a viewpoint that entrepreneur’s job is to making innovation, which would means the technological progress and growth. And entrepreneur would heavily influence the dissemination of a new technology. The economy will more productive if the new technology is used worldwide. He insisted that entrepreneurial talent and motivational mechanisms are important in successful economy, and entrepreneur can be trained. Moreover, in his point, entrepreneurs and the market mechanism with its pricing process helps each other to run in the economy.

The lecture I attended was an entrepreneurship panel to learn about the “ins” and “outs” of starting a company. It took place on Wednesday, October 25, 2017 at 7 p.m. in Peter, Wright and McKenna rooms in the UC. It featured a panel of five entrepreneurs, some of who were CMU graduates. In the first part of the panel discussion, each panelist gave a brief description of their career and how they became entrepreneurs. Something that I liked about the panel was that they had people who were very different in terms of their experience in start ups; one of the panelists quit his job a week ago and was just starting his own business, another has been an entrepreneur for 30 years, one has had many companies and has also sold a few, and another panelist teaches a course on entrepreneurship at CMU; it was great to get different perspectives from those in different points in their career. I also really liked that many of the panelists did not know that they wanted to start their own business straight out of college, and the panelist who very recently quit his job to focus on his business showed me that it is entirely possible to switch careers and that you do not have to feel confined to one job or area. Also, many of the panelists graduated with a degree in engineering and stated that having a technical background when you want to become an entrepreneur is beneficial because it broadens your options of what you can do in terms of product design and technology.

This school sees strategy formation as a visionary process and is fell under the descriptive school of strategic management. The chief architect of the strategy is the CEO of a company. This school took formal leadership seriously and CEO is responsible for strategy formulation. It stressed on mental state and processes such as instinctive knowledge, belief, wisdom, experience and insight of a single leader. The leader should be visionary in formulating strategy. The entrepreneurial school promotes strategy as a process which has a clear image and sense of direction which can be termed as a vision. Entrepreneurial strategy often occurs in startup companies and organizations in trouble and needing a

Ahmad and Hoffmann (2008), summarise the role of entrepreneurship from different perspective; defining entrepreneurship as the mind-set and process to create and develop economic activity by blending risk-taking (with Knights), creativity (with Kirzner) and innovation (with Schumpeter) with sound management, within a new or an existing organization. However, the multidimensional aspects of entrepreneurship make it particularly difficult to find a measure that covers all of these dimensions. Therefore, measuring entrepreneurship has occupied scholars for many years, such ambiguity in the understanding of entrepreneurship is mainly ascribed to the dynamic and complicated nature of entrepreneurship (Baumol, 2002). Frequently used measures are, SME’s, Self-employment, Business Ownership, and New venture creation.

Entrepreneurship can simply be defined as the art and process that “ involves capturing ideas, converting them into products and, or services and then building a venture to take the product to market” (Zhao, pp. 26). The essential aims to be accomplished by these procedures is the creation of a new organizations or reganerating any part of any organizations for the purpose of achieving further improvement and betterment of the comprehensive business or company. For entrepreneurs sans of access to an inaugurate business system, incubators and accelerators provide a possible support mechanism for access to partners and resources. The process of Entrepreneurship can be labeled into a number of categories. These may include economical, social or other forms of entrepreneurship. However, it is important to note that one of comparatively recent discovered and introduced type of entrepreneurship is the Technological Entrepreneurship.

Schumpeter denoted entrepreneur as a key in the economic growth and entrepreneurial process as a prime element in the progress and advancement of economy. Again he stated that entrepreneurship is an essential element for the development of any economy and economic and political framework condition would not affect the growth.