Why Entrepreneurship Matters
Entrepreneurshipis the transformation of an innovation into a sustainable enterprise that generates value. An entrepreneur is any entity, new or existing, that provides a new product or service or that develops and uses new methods to produce or deliver existing goods and services at lower cost. 1 Entrepreneurs innovate new ways of manipulating nature, and new ways of assembling and coordinating people….The innovator shows that a product, a process, or a mode of organization can be efficient and profitable, and that elevates the entire economy.
2 Entrepreneurs take risks to develop a novel, sustainable enterprise a new or improved product, service, or mode of organization that can exist independent of its originator that benefits the economy and society.
Though entrepreneurship can involve and thus often is mistaken for invention, creativity, management, starting a small business, or becoming self-employed, it is neither identical with nor reducible to any of them. The defining trait of entrepreneurship is the creation of a novel enterprise that the market is
willing to adopt. Hence, entrepreneurship entails the commercialization (or its functional equivalent) of an innovation. New ideas, products, or organizational schemes matter little until they achieve concrete reality in the marketplace that is, until they are actually used. The market judges utility and need along with excellence. It does not value and does not need to value every good idea.
The entrepreneur’s risk, therefore, is not a gamble but an informed calculation about the viability of the new enterprise in the market, about its capacity to meetade mandor need of others . Entrepreneurship emerges from the realm of commerce, but it cannot be restricted there. Business is part of society. Cultural and social values and economic policies and behaviors shape and validate one another. For entrepreneurship to be a mainstream and routine business practice, it must reflect its society’s view of how the world should work and how human beings should behave.
Social attitudes, political practices, economic policies, and the legal system must support creativity, risk-taking, and the implementation of new enterprises.
Entrepreneurship cannot thrive if its society’s values undermine it. Entrepreneurship is a process of fundamental transformation: from innovative idea to enterprise and from enterprise to value. The very ordinariness of entrepreneurship in American commerce points to a society that prizes originality and improvement and the human traits that enable both.
Thus, entrepreneurship is more than a business practice. As a distinct mode of thought and action, it derives from business but can operate in any realm of human endeavor. Entrepreneurship merges the visionary and the pragmatic. It requires knowledge, imagination, perception, practicality, persistence, and attention to others. Entrepreneurship is a selfactualizing and a self-transcending activity that through responsiveness to the market integrates the self, the entrepreneur, with society.
Unavoidably, there for e , entrepreneurship is an exercise in social responsibility. To suppress or constrain innovation and improvement and their implementation ignores a society’s needs and wants, holds it back, and diminishes its future. Entrepreneurship is the unique process that, by fusing innovation and implementation, allows individuals to bring new ideas into being for the benefit of themselves and others. It is sui generis, an irreducible form of freedom.
Why Entrepreneurship Belongs in College Our recommendation is based on four key conside rations . First, entrepreneurship is critical to understanding and succeeding in the contemporary global economy.
Second, entrepreneurship is already an expanding area of American college learning. Third, entrepreneurship is becoming a basic part of what universities themselves do.
Fourth, entrepreneurship meets many of the goals of a quality American undergraduate education.
1 William J. Baumol, Robert E. Litan, and Carl J. Schramm, Good Capitalism, Bad Capitalism, and the Economics of Growth and Prosperity (Yale University Press, 2007), p. 3. This definition reflects the authors’ critical distinction between ‘replicative’ entrepreneurs those producing or selling a good or service already available through other sources and ‘innovative’ entrepreneurs, who matter for economic growth. 2 J.Bradford DeLong, Creative Destruction’s Reconstruction: Joseph Schumpeter Revisited, The Chronicle of Higher Education, December 7, 2007, www.chronicle.com; Section: The Chronicle Review, Volume 54, Issue15, Page B8.
