entrepreneur

A person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture.

[French, from Old French, from entreprendre, to undertake. See enterprise.]

An individual who, rather than working as an employee, runs a small business and assumes all the risk and reward of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. The entrepreneur is commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business processes.

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Entrepreneurs play a key role in any economy. These are the people who have the skills and initiative necessary to take good new ideas to market and make the right decisions to make the idea profitable. The reward for the risks taken is the potential economic profits the entrepreneur could earn.

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Person who takes on the risks of starting a new business. Many entrepreneurs have technical knowledge with which to produce a saleable product or to design a needed new service. Often, Venture Capital is used to finance the startup in return for a piece of the equity. Once an entrepreneur's business is established, shares may be sold to the public as an Initial Public Offering assuming favorable market conditions.

An individual who generates business activity. A businessman or businesswoman. Often associated with one who takes business risks.
Examples: Businesses owned by entrepreneurs include:

• auto dealerships

• restaurants

• retail stores

• wholesale distributing companies

noun

One that creates, founds, or originates: architect, author, creator, father, founder², inventor, maker, originator, parent, patriarch. See start/end.

An organizer, singly or in partnership, who takes risks in creating, investing in, and developing a firm from its inception through to hoped-for profitability as goods and services are marketed. The enterprise of the entrepreneur can be seen as a fourth factor of production, but other writers would classify it as a form of labour.

An entrepreneurial city is characterized by business-led urban development, technological innovation, social capital featuring skilled labour, and social and environmental sustainability, and supported by local authorities, educational and training institutions, and its own heritage and cultural industries. This is often coupled with aggressive marketing: to become an EU ‘capital of culture’ (Liverpool 2008), or to host the Olympic Games (Sydney 2000) or ‘Expos’—international trade fairs (Hamburg 1999). For entrepreneurial urbanism in east Manchester, see K. Ward, Area 35. Welfare geographers fear that private sector domination of the city will result in a decline of public services and infrastructure; the marketization of educational institutions; assistance for business as the first priority of local government; and a move to mass culture in the city's arts and entertainment infrastructure.

One who starts a business or other venture that promises economic gain but that also entails risks.

• Platform: IBM PC Compatible
• Release Date: 1995
• Genre: Strategy
• Style: Empire-Building

For the practice of starting a new organization, see Entrepreneurship.

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An entrepreneur is a person who has possession of an enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. It is an ambitious leader who combines land, labor, and capital to often create and market new goods or services. ... ^[1] The term is a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist, believed to have coined the word Entrepreneur first in about at 1800. He said an entrepreneur is "one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as intermediatory between capital and labour".^[2]

Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, resulting in many new ventures failing. The word entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist currently. Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and exploit it by organizing their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions within a given sector.

Observers see them as being willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue opportunity.

Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either "political entrepreneurs" or "market entrepreneurs," while social entrepreneurs' principal objectives include the creation of a social and/or environmental benefit.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Entrepreneur as a leader 3 See also 4 References 5 External links

Etymology

Credit for coining the word "entrepreneur" goes to Jean-Baptiste Say, a nineteenth century economist.^[3]

The word "entrepreneur" (f. entrepreneuse) is a loanword from French. In French the verb "entreprendre" means "to undertake," with "entre" coming from the Latin word meaning "between," and "prendre" meaning "to take." In French a person who performs a verb, has the ending of the verb changed to "eur," comparable to the "er" ending in English. "Unternehmer" (lit. "undertaker" in the literal sense of the word) is the high German equivalent and curiously, "Unternehmensforschung" is the German equivalent of Operations Research although the Anglo-Saxon model of the firm is fairly anti-thetical to the notion of management as a science.

Entrepreneur as a leader

Scholar Robert. B. Reich considers leadership, management ability, and team-building as essential qualities of an entrepreneur. This concept has its origins in the work of Richard Cantillon in his Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (1755) and Jean-Baptiste Say (1803 or 1834)^[4] in his Treatise on Political Economy.

A more generally held theory is that entrepreneurs emerge from the population on demand, from the combination of opportunities and people well-positioned to take advantage of them. An entrepreneur may perceive that they are among the few to recognize or be able to solve a problem. In this view, one studies on one side the distribution of information available to would-be entrepreneurs (see Austrian School economics) and on the other, how environmental factors (access to capital, competition, etc.) change the rate of a society's production of entrepreneurs.^{[citation needed]}

A prominent theorist of the Austrian School in this regard is Joseph Schumpeter, who saw the entrepreneur as innovators and popularized the uses of the phrase creative destruction to describe his view of the role of entrepreneurs in changing business norms.

See also

Look up entrepreneur in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Entrepreneurship education
• Factors of production
• Infopreneur
• Leadership

References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (November 2008)

1. ^ Sullivan, arthur; Steven M. Sheffrin (2003). Economics: Principles in action. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey 07458: Pearson Prentice Hall. pp. 6. ISBN 0-13-063085-3. http://www.pearsonschool.com/index.cfm?locator=PSZ3R9&PMDbSiteId=2781&PMDbSolutionId=6724&PMDbCategoryId=&PMDbProgramId=12881&level=4. 
2. ^ Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus, Tim Hindle, The Economist, page 77,
3. ^ See WILLIAM J. BAUMOL, ROBERT E. LIAN & CARL J. SCHRAMM, GOOD CAPITALISM, BAD CAPITALISM, AND THE ECONOMICS OF GROWTH AND PROSPERITY 3 (2007) (citing generally PETER F. DRUCKER, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP (1985) (attributing coining and defining of “entrepreneur” to JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY, A TREATISE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY (1834)); but see Robert H. Brockhaus, Sr., The Psychology of the Entrepreneur, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP 40 (Calvin A. Kent, et al. eds. 1982) (citing J.S. MILL, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY WITH SOME OF THEIR APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (1848). Note, however, that Drucker's cited book was published in 1986
4. ^ See WILLIAM J. BAUMOL, ROBERT E. LITAN & CARL J. SCHRAMM, GOOD CAPITALISM, BAD CAPITALISM, AND THE ECONOMICS OF GROWTH AND PROSPERITY 3 (2007) (citing generally PETER F. DRUCKER, INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP (1985) (attributing coining and defining of “entrepreneur” to JEAN-BAPTISTE SAY, A TREATISE ON POLITICAL ECONOMY (1834)); but see Robert H. Brockhaus, Sr., The Psychology of the Entrepreneur, in ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP 40 (Calvin A. Kent, et al. eds. 1982) (citing J.S. MILL, PRINCIPLES OF POLITICAL ECONOMY WITH SOME OF THEIR APPLICATIONS TO SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY (1848). Note that, despite Baumol et al.'s citation, the Drucker book was published in 1986.

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (January 2009)

External links

• Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
• The Entrepreneurs' Organization

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Common misspelling(s) of entrepreneur

• entrepeneur

Dansk (Danish)
n. - entreprenør, spekulant, arrangør, bedriftsleder, mellemmand

Nederlands (Dutch)
ondernemer, bemiddelaar

Français (French)
n. - entrepreneur

Deutsch (German)
n. - Unternehmer

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - επιχειρηματίας, (μουσ.) ιμπρεσάριος

Italiano (Italian)
imprenditore

Português (Portuguese)
n. - empresário (m), empreendedor (m)

Русский (Russian)
предприниматель, антрепренер

Español (Spanish)
n. - empresario

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - företagare, entreprenör

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
企业家, 主办人

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 企業家, 主辦人

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 기업가

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 企業家, 興行主

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) رجل أعمال, المقاول‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮קבלן, אמרגן‬

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