entrepreneurship

n. quality of being enterprising and full of initiative, practice of starting or undertaking new businesses

To-date, there is no generally agreed upon definition of entrepreneurship. However a number of important definitions have been put forward by leading thinkers in the discipline. This include: 1) the creation of new enterprises (Low and MacMillan, 1988), 2) the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities (Kirzner, 1977, 1997), 3) the study of what, how and why entrepreneurs act (Stevenson and Jarillo, 1990), 4) new entry (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996). More recently, in their seminal article that has sparked new interest in research in entrepreneurship worldwide, Shane and Venkataraman (2000) defined it as the study of how and why entrepreneurial opportunities are discovered, evaluated and exploited and who does this.
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An entrepreneur (a loanword from French introduced and first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon) is a person who operates a new enterprise or venture and assumes some accountability for the inherent risks. A female entrepreneur is sometimes referred to as an entrepreneuse.The newly and modern view on entrepreneurial talent is a person who takes the risks involved to undertake a business venture. In doing so, they are said to efficiently and effectively use the factors of production. That is land (natural resources), labor (human input into production using available resources) and capital (any type of equipment used in production i.e. machinery). A business that can efficiently manage this and in the long-run hopefully expand (future prospects of larger firms and businesses), will become successful.
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French term (taken over into English) for "enterpriser" or "one who undertakes." An entrepreneur is a person who detects a previously untapped opportunity to make substantial profits (either by lowering the costs of producing existing good/services or by creating brand new ways for people to satisfy their wants through new products) -- and then takes the initiative in bringing together the necessary factors of production to exploit this opportunity, typically by organizing a new business firm (or perhaps a new subdivision of an existing firm) for the purpose. The new opportunity which the entrepreneur has detected may involve the introduction of a new good or service only recently invented or improved. It might involve introducing some existing good or service into a new market area where it is presently unavailable or deepening the original market by finding and publicizing new ways for new groups of customers to use it. It might involve recognizing the potential of some new production technology for dramatically lowering the costs of production of an existing good or service, making it possible to garner huge sales increases at the expense of much higher cost substitutes that are thereby rendered obsolete and no longer competitive. Entrepreneurs thus serve an important role in enabling the economy to adapt to changing conditions and new possibilities for material improvements by creating new production organizations, and even whole new industries. Because of its essential role in initiating the process of production, entrepreneurship is identified by some economists as a "fourth factor of production ," alongside land , labor and capital .
In its essence, entrepreneurship involves looking ahead to foresee future conditions of supply and/or demand that will be quite substantially different from present conditions. Having arrived at a vision of the future based on observation of previously unnoticed trends, tentative theories, recent discoveries and inventions, and a large dose of creative imagination, the entrepreneur differentiates himself from the prophet, the social scientist and the idle dreamer by taking practical action to reallocate costly resources in the present so as to prepare for meeting an expected future demand. However, if the entrepreneur's vision of the future proves to be incorrect, all or part of the resources mobilized to prepare for that future may prove to have been wasted, so there are risks of large losses. The prospect of far above average profitability is normally necessary to attract the necessary resources into an undertaking with such a high possibility of loss. Being the first in the field with an exceptionally good idea may well yield far above average profits because of the possibilities for explosive sales growth and because of especially favorable pricing conditions enjoyed due to the temporary monopoly the firm enjoys until imitators can gear up to enter the marketplace. More...