History of Entrepreneurship

An entrepreneur has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running a new business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a early company, present a product, process or service for sale and the people who involved called 'entrepreneurs'. While definitions of entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the high risks involved in launching a startup, a significant proportion of businesses have to close, due to a lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis or a combination of all of these. In the 2000s, the definition of 'entrepreneurship' has been expanded to explain how and why some individuals identify opportunities, evaluate them as visible, and then decide to exploit them, where as others do not and turn how entrepreneurs use these opportunities to develop new products or services to launch new firms or even new industries and create wealth. Recent advances stress the fundamentally uncertain nature of the entrepreneurial process, because although opportunities exist their existence cannot be discovered or identified prior to their actualization into profits. What appears as a real opportunity might actually be a non-opportunity or one that cannot be actualized by entrepreneurs lacking the necessary business skills, financial or social capital.

An entrepreneur is typically in control of a commercial undertaking, directing the factors of production, financial and material resources that are required to exploit a business opportunity. They act as the manager and check the launch and growth of an enterprise or company. Entrepreneurship is the process by which an individual or group identifies a business opportunity and acquires and deploys the necessary resources required for its exploitation. The exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities may include actions such as developing a business plan, hiring the human resources, acquiring financial and material resources, providing leadership, and being responsible for the venture's success or failure. Economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) stated that the role of the entrepreneur in the economy is 'creative destruction' launching innovations that simultaneously destroy old industries.