Bella Gilliland
EEE2083
In the first article read we were faced with the statement that asking
“who is an entrepreneur?”(Gartner,1988,1)
is the wrong question. This article instead focused on describing what an entrepreneur is, and it had a lot to do with what went on through people’s heads when given certain situations. The interesting thing to me about this article was that there was so much time and resources dedicated to this question as if everyone would not have a different definition. While reading this article I came across something that really piqued my interest, the trait approach. This was one-way people set out to try and define what an entrepreneur was, they thought that if they could find similar traits among all entrepreneurs then they could figure out who would be great before they even launched their first entrepreneurship. Some of the traits they looked at can be found in the chart below,
(Gartner,1988,3)
While looking at this table it became clear that while some of the definitions are similar and some of the people even have some similar traits everyone works slightly differently which I think is very important to look at. Because if you go into the article “In search of the meaning of entrepreneurship” we can see what entrepreneurship can be split into, my favorite take on entrepreneurship was when the author began speaking about entrepreneurship versus small business owners. Because even though these two things were first introduced as two separate things the author slowly brings them together as under the same umbrella, which I will get into later. Another thing I want to go into is Sarasvathey’s three things that make an entrepreneur an entrepreneur.
Starting with Herbert I want to get into how he discussed entrepreneurship versus small business owners. When Herbert first starts he describes these things as very separate entities, I find this interesting because on the first read you kind of have this moment, or at least I did, where you begin to question which do I want to do? I actually took a break from reading and broke down what I thought of this idea, and before I read on I came to the conclusion that they are similar things just with different diction. Of course, as I read on I was able to see that the author, as he described that people only see one big difference between the two categories was that small business owners are looking for some form of fulfillment while entrepreneurs are looking for money. Then he goes into detail that why can’t they be the same. Because some people who own small businesses are in it for money and some entrepreneurs have a specific goal, so really there are not too many if any differences. This is an interesting point in my opinion because it gave me this moment of thinking just because people think two things are different doesn’t mean you have to look at the world the same as everyone else. Another point I thought was interesting about Herbert, was when he said
“Popular writers of the day usually posit their own definitions and conceptualizations of the entrepreneur.”(Herbert,1989,2)
I think this goes with the other part of the article that I liked in the sense that people have different meanings to things and there can be truth found in all of them.
Looking at Sarasvathehy’s three categories,
“(1) Who they are – their traits, tastes, and abilities; (2) What they know – their education, training, expertise, and experience; and, (3) Whom they know – their social and professional networks.”(Sarasvathey,2006, 3)
Let’s start with who they, the entrepreneur, are. I agree that it is important to understand who someone is in order to understand how they might think as an entrepreneur. If you know more about the person I think we can connect that back to the other articles where we say that everything can have different meanings. What I mean by this is that just as everyone has a different definition of entrepreneurship everyone has a different taste. Looking at Sarasvathey's second point, we take a deeper look into the knowledge needed to be an entrepreneur. In the other articles, they go into a bit of detail about how some studies have been done to show that in most cases people who go into entrepreneurship have a different thought pattern than the average person, they are more likely to be able to cope with risk. The last point made in “What Makes an Entrepreneur” was the point of who people know. The other thing that makes the entrepreneurial mindset different is that we thrive on meeting people and because of this we are more likely to form connections that allow us to have a larger social network.
Works Cited
Gartner, W. b. (n.d.). “who is an entrepreneur?” is the wrong question - William B. Gartner, 1989. Retrieved January 31, 2023, from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/104225878901300406
Hébert, Robert F., and Albert N. Link. “In Search of the Meaning of Entrepreneurship - Small Business Economics.” SpringerLink, Kluwer Academic Publishers, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF00389915.
Sarasvathy, S. D. (2008, October 21). What makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial? SSRN. Retrieved January 30, 2023, from https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=909038
