for: Entrepreneurship for: The Entrepreneur

Wikify: date=January 2009

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, labour, and capital to create and market new goods or services. 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 be 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".

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.

Etymology

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

The word "entrepreneur" 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.

Enterprise is similar to and has roots in, the French word "entreprise," which is the past participle of "entreprendre."

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) in his Treatise on Political Economy. "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.