THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
Hunting the Entrepreneurship Snark
Government economic policies often feature entrepreneurship , supposedly as a cure for our economic ills – and therefore we have been searching for it . But does it actually exist ? asks Ulster University Visiting Professor Simon Bridge
“ They sought it with thimbles , they sought it with care ; They pursued it with forks and hope ; They threatened its life with a railway-share ; They charmed it with smiles and soap .” ( Lewis Carroll , The Hunting of the Snark )
W
e took the word ‘ entrepreneur ’ from the French to describe a particular sort of economic actor , despite George Bush ’ s reported observation that they didn ’ t have a work for it .
Then someone added the suffix ‘ ship ’ to create a label for the condition of becoming or being an entrepreneur .
Having a word for it helped to convince people that this condition existed and a further boost to its credibility came in the 1980s when , at a time of rising unemployment , governments latched onto the finding that small businesses were then the main source of new jobs .
Actually there was some dispute over this conclusion , and the debate still continues . Nevertheless , to governments desperate to find some way of addressing unemployment , it looked like the answer to their prayers .
So they wanted more small businesses and , thinking that entrepreneurship was the condition with produced more entrepreneurs who would create more businesses , they wanted more entrepreneurship .
Therefore governments funded efforts to research and promote entrepreneurship – which led to an entrepreneurship ‘ industry ’, manifest not least in universities and business schools . It was reported that in 2008 there were 5,000 entrepreneurship courses being offered by colleges and universities just in the USA and in 2013 over 400,000 students studying it .
Of course universities wanted to do it because there was money in it , but , to justify their involvement , the academics concerned also wanted to establish it as a respected academic discipline – and for that they needed to demonstrate that it had an appropriate ‘ scientific ’ foundation .
A review of papers and articles about this suggests that , to establish its credibility , two assumptions were made : that entrepreneurship exists as a specific discrete identifiable phenomenon which somehow produces more and / or better entrepreneurs and that this phenomenon is deterministic in that it operates in a consistent way in accordance with ‘ rules ’ which can be identified and from which its behaviour can then be predicted .
And those assumptions in turn provided a focus for academic research : to identify and define this phenomenon and then to establish the ‘ rules ’ governing its operation .
However that leads to a problem because , after decades of effort , neither assumption has been show to be correct . Despite lots of suggestions , we still lack a single agreed definition of what entrepreneurship is and instead the word continues to be used with a wide range of meanings , some of which are mutually inconsistent .
A look at the literature in this area reveals many different uses and definitions of the word entrepreneurship ranging , for instance , from wide definitions such as that produced at Harvard that it is ‘ the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control ’, to narrow attempts to limit it only to the creation of hightech and / or highgrowth businesses and even to negative views associating it with the supposed excesses of capitalism and nearcriminal activity .
Although a number of commentators have suggested that a common definition was being developed , that has not happened and , as a result , the use of the word continues to cause confusion .
Some believe that , given time , the confusion will be resolved . There is a story of three people who were blindfolded and then each
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