The Portrait of the Entrepreneur
The author, J.A. Schumpeter (1934), presents a portrait of this very particular economic agent as follows. Being an entrepreneur is not a profession at all, and certainly not a conventional rule, or even a comfortable state. Very briefly, a person is an entrepreneur if he performs new combinations, even if he is not the creator of the materials of the new combinations (in fact, this is not the most important for the author). J.A Schumpeter uses also the metaphor of a closed circuit in order to explain that when the entrepreneur loses this specific character, he continues to operate, but only within a circuit created by the company. The entrepreneur could be either a founder or an employee. But the image of a “captain of industry” or a creator seems to be a more consistent concept according to the Schumpeterian entrepreneur.
J.A. Schumpeter (1934) insists on the very specific character of the entrepreneur. He compares the entrepreneur to people who...
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Munier, F. (2013). Schumpeterian Entrepreneur. In: Carayannis, E.G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-3858-8_243
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