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Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Enterpreneur

Entrepreneur
Enterpreneur
An entrepreneur (a loanword from French introduced and first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon) is a person who operates a new enterprise or venture and assumes some accountability for the inherent risks. A female entrepreneur is sometimes referred to as an entrepreneuse.
The newly and modern view on entrepreneurial talent is a person who takes the risks involved to undertake a business venture. In doing so, they are said to efficiently and effectively use the factors of production. That is land (natural resources), labor (human input into production using available resources) and capital (any type of equipment used in production i.e. machinery). A business that can efficiently manage this and in the long-run hopefully expand (future prospects of larger firms and businesses), will become successful.
Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, as many new ventures fail. In the context of the creation of for-profit enterprises, entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service in order to obtain certain profit. While there is social entrepreneurship in most markets, business entrepreneurs often have strong beliefs about a market opportunity and are willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue that opportunity. Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either "political entrepreneurs" or "market entrepreneurs."
Definition and terminology
An entrepreneur is someone who seeks to capitalize on new and profitable endeavors or business; usually with considerable initiative and risk.
Etymology
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". In French a person who performs a verb, has the ending of the verb changed to "eur", comparable to the "er" ending in English. Therefore, an entrepreneur is an undertaker, a person who undertakes a task.
Enterprise is similar to and has roots in, the French word "entreprise", which is the past particple of "entreprendre".
Entrepreneuse is simply the French feminine word for "entrepreneur".
Entrepreneur as a leader
Scholar R. 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) 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. The 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. A prominent theorist of the Austrian School in this regard is Joseph Schumpeter who sees the entrepreneur as innovator.

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