Function for Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is a subfield of study in Strategic Management and has close linkages with Innovation scholarship too. Everyone likes to call themselves entrepreneurs these days. Some by virtue of running their own businesses and some by running business units or verticals under big organizations.

Entrepreneurship as a concept was introduced by Schumpeter, an Austrian economist. It was his "wild spirits" who carry out the activity of Unternehmergeist (German for entrepreneurship) and do "creative destruction" and hence enable some nations to have more economic activity (GDP) than others.

I try to build a function of entrepreneurship below. A fun way to explain what it takes to be an entrepreneur.

1. The basic function

2. The function for a successful entrepreneur

We add to the above formula the mantra for success and we have an additional variable of profits in our function.

3. Linkages of the function's variables with academic disciplines and fields of study.

Entrepreneurship is a multidisciplinary field. The very first step of having an idea when it is in the conceptualization phase in the person's mind as a figment of his brain is Philosophy (love for ideas).

Bringing that idea to a prototype can be directly linked to technology. In business strategy, any process that converts inputs to outputs is technology. This is Thompson's conceptualization (in his seminal book Organizations in Action) of technology in organizations and can very well be a non- technical, human process. Commercialisation is taking this prototype to the market and actually selling the product to the customer, that is used by the end consumer. This would come under the purview of business management.

Last is profits. This is dealt by what is known as the "theory of the firm".

My future posts in this section will examine the various theories that explain the question - why do firms exist?

I hope the readers find this useful and enjoy.