A complete Definition of Entrepreneurship

There are many definitions of the concept ‘entrepreneurship’. For instance, Putari (2006) observes that scholars had not been in agreement in their definitions of entrepreneurship and chronicled the definitions of entrepreneurship by various scholars (Brockhaus & Horwitz, 1986, Sexton & Smilor, Wortman, 1987; Gartner, 1988). Cantillon (circa 1730) views entrepreneurship as: “self employment of any sort”. In 1934, Joseph Schumpeter equated entrepreneurship with the concept of innovation and applied it to a business context, while emphasizing the combination of resources. Penrose (1963) views entrepreneurship as the activity that involves identifying opportunities within the economic system.


While Leibenstein (1968, 1979) perceives entrepreneurship as involving "activities necessary to create or carry on an enterprise where not all markets are well established or clearly defined and/or in which relevant parts of the production function are not completely known”. Gartner (1988) conceives entrepreneurship as the creation of new organizations. Okpara (2000) defines entrepreneurship as the willingness and ability of an individual to seek out investment opportunities in an environment and be able to establish and run an enterprise successfully based on the identifiable opportunities.

In addition, Nwachukwu (1990) regards entrepreneurship as a process of seeing and evaluating business opportunities, gathering the necessary resources to take advantage of them and initiate appropriate action to ensure success.


From the definitions above, entrepreneurship is a function which involves the exploitation of opportunities which exist within a market.

Thus, from the definitions above we can see that while defining the concept ‘entrepreneurship’, laid emphasis on a wide spectrum of activities such as:

· Self-employment of any sort.
· Creation of organizations.
· Innovation applied to a business context.
· The combination of resources.
· Identification and exploitation of opportunities within the economic system or market.
· The bringing together of factors of production under uncertainty.


We can therefore conclude that whatever activity that involves any or all of the above activities can be regarded as entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship refers to all the processes and activities involved in establishing, nurturing, and sustaining a business enterprise.