Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship has been an elusive phenomenon in much economics scholarship. It is typically subsumed under the managerial function as an organizing factor of production. Part of the difficulty in studying entrepreneurship is that standard economic methods focus on constrained optimization (i.e., economizing) within a given ends-means framework, whereas entrepreneurship is related more to people's discovering and creating new ends and new means. Entrepreneurship is intimately connected with the notion of economic change, and just as there are different conceptions [Page 149]of economic change, so too there are different conceptions of the entrepreneurial function.

Joseph Schumpeter's conception of the entrepreneur emphasized creative changes and heroic, large-scale innovations. (His later work, however, adopted a wider definition that embraced more humble acts of entrepreneurship.) Schumpeter's focus was on “new ...