| |
| Entrepreneur
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards.
Please improve this article if you can.
For the sequel to the computer game Entrepreneur, which has no article of its own, see The Corporate Machine.
An entrepreneur (a loanword from french introduced and first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon) is a person who undertakes and 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), labour (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.
Entrepreneurship is often difficult, as many new ventures fail. In the context of the creation of for-profit enterprises, entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates system to offer a product or service in order to obtain certain profit. Business entrepreneurs often have strong beliefs about a market opportunity and are willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue that opportunity. Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either "political entrepreneurs" or "market entrepreneurs."
David Gladstone in his book Venture Capital Investing, provides the following descriptive answer:
The term entrepreneur has undergone a change in meaning since the late 1800s, when it was used to refer to the “director or manager of a public musical institution” (see The Oxford Universal Dictionary). Entrepreneur derives the French verb entreprendre (to undertake), which, however, had already entered English many years earlier in the form of enterprise, from enterpris, the past participle of entreprendre. Enterprise first appeared around 1430 and was commonly used to refer to an undertaking of bold and arduous nature, The person carrying out the enterprise was known as the enterpriser but eventually lost ground to entrepreneur, the primary meaning of which became “one who organizes, manages and assumes the risk of a business or enterprises” (see Webster’s).
His further explanation illustrates that one of the many outstanding characteristics of every entrepreneur is a drive to be independent. The entrepreneur wants to be autonomous. They need to dominate the situation, need to be in control and to direct others.
Gladstone argues that most entrepreneurs are very confident about what they are doing and, at times, confused with self-centredness. However most often their high self-esteem is merely an outward manifestation of their personal self-confidence. Because of this, according to Gladstone, most entrepreneurs exhibit good leadership and have the ability to set goals and work towards them.
|
|
|
