24/09/2018
Introduction
What is an entrepreneur? What characterizes entrepreneurs and distinguishes them from other
organizational and social actors? How can the entrepreneur be defined? These are typical
questions that most new entrepreneurship researchers ask, and to which a variety of answers
can be found in the literature. As for why there is such a broad range of perspectives, the
answer is far from simple.
First of all, the range of entrepreneurial roles is increasing steadily, and now includes venture
creators, technopreneurs, intrapreneurs, extrapreneurs, social entrepreneurs, the self-employed
and many others. In this text, the term “entrepreneur” is used to refer to all these
entrepreneurial actors.
Observation reveals that entrepreneurship is a complex phenomenon involving a set of activities
with technical, human, managerial and entrepreneurial characteristics, the performance of
which requires a diverse set of skills. Generally, entrepreneurial actors play additional roles
(mainly managerial) when they carry their entrepreneurial activities, and this, too, must be
taken into account. Clearly, the range of roles begs the question as to what constitutes the
common core activities for all these actors and what sets the entrepreneurial aspect of their
activities apart from the other aspects.
Given the many different categories and types of entrepreneurs, it is reasonable to wonder
whether there can possibly be elements that are common to them all. Why are there so many
definitions of the entrepreneur? In fact, there are several reasons, including the range of
disciplines, research fields and paradigms through which actors and situations can be studied.
The humanities differ from physics and the other “hard” sciences, in that specialists can study
and define phenomena from widely different standpoints.
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