The Origin of Entrepreneurship

Various scholars have written extensively on the origin of entrepreneurship. What is interesting is that most of the scholars who wrote about the origin of entrepreneurship are either economists or historians. Basically, the concept entrepreneur is derived from the French concept “entreprendre” which literarily is equivalent to the English concept “to undertake”. From the business point of view, to undertake simply means to start a business (QuickMBA, 2010). From the historical point of view, Schumpeter (1951) opined that the French economist Richard Cantillon, was the first to introduce the concept "entrepreneur" in his work in 1755. He viewed the entrepreneur as a risk taker (Burnett, 2000).



However, some scholars contend that it was an economist, Jean-Baptiste Say, who analysed the concept in an advanced way in his work in 1821 where he identified entrepreneur as new economic phenomenon (Wikipedia, 2010). Given the foregoing, we can infer that the concept “entrepreneur” is almost as old as the formal discipline of economics itself (Schumpeter, 1951) especially given the fact that it was economists such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill who have written extensively on it, albeit referring to it as "business management”.

However, unlike Smith and Ricardo, Mill stressed the significance of entrepreneurship for economic growth. Another renowned economist, Alfred Marshall buttressed Mill’s view by formally recognizing entrepreneurship as an important factor of production in 1890; he viewed entrepreneurship as organization creation and believed that entrepreneurship is the driving element behind organization (Schumpeter,
1951; Burnett, 2000).

Schumpeter (1951) contends with this view and opined that though many economics scholars agree that entrepreneurship is necessary for economic growth, they do not agree on the actual role that entrepreneurs play in generating economic growth. These debates, notwithstanding, entrepreneurship theory has kept on evolving over the years and throughout its evolution different scholars have put forward different characteristics that they believe are common among most entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurship theoretical foundations extend from economics to other disciplines such as history, politics, education, ecology, culture, experience, and networking and so on. To this effect, Schumpeter (1951) concludes that by combining the various disparate theories, a generalized set of entrepreneurship qualities can be developed. He then listed the characteristics of entrepreneurs as: risk-bearers, coordinators and organizers, gap-fillers, leaders, and innovators or creative imitators. He submits that though not exhaustive, this can help explain why some people become entrepreneurs while others do not (Burnett, 2000).