These are all solid motivations. Without motivations like these, why would anyone
choose to take on the risk associated with starting a new venture?
The word entrepreneur comes from a French word,
that I'll try to pronounce correctly as "entreprendre."
Which can be interpreted as meaning "undertaker,"
no not that kind of undertaker.
This would be someone who undertakes or takes on a major project.
In the early 1800s, Jean Baptiste Say provided the first commonly understood
definition of an entrepreneur.
"The entrepreneur shift economic resources out of an area of lower and
into an area of higher productivity and greater yield."
The focus here is really on productivity.
Entrepreneurs introduce new ways of doing things that enhance efficiency and
productivity.
This definition doesn't really address who benefits from the wealth that is
created in the process.
In 1942, the economist Joseph Schumpeter
provided a new definition of entrepreneurship.
He wrote that entrepreneurs reform or revolutionize the pattern of production
by exploiting an invention or an untried technological possibility.
He introduced the concept of creative destruction.
So far, neither of these definitions really rely on the concept of new venture
creation.
In 1983, Howard Stevenson provided a new definition,
one that it's much more focused on starting a company from scratch.
Stevenson said that entrepreneurship is "the pursuit of opportunity
without regard to resources currently controlled."
Now we're starting to pay attention to how entrepreneurs launch new ventures.
They start with a concept, they develop a strategy,
they raise capital, they hire a team, and they build a business.
In 2000, Scott Shane, from the Dingman center for entrepreneurship at
the University of Maryland, and S. Venkataraman, from the Baton center for
entrepreneurial leadership at the University of Virginia, co-wrote
the definition of entrepreneurship that we'll use in this course.
They wrote that entrepreneurship is the discovery, evaluation, and
exploitation of opportunities.
This is a simple but powerful definition and
it's consistent with the three step, discover,
test, launch approach to entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship education.
It's also consistent with the build, measure, learn, feedback loop that's been
popularized as part of the lean start up approach to entrepreneurship.