Entrepreneurs today, are everyones’ super heroes.
A supposition easily established by the fact that, this prevailing fascination with ‘entrepreneurship’ has taken into the 21st century cinemas. With characters like –‘Bruce Wayne and –Tony Stark’ as successful entrepreneurs turned super heroes saving the day; these fantasy characters have drawn in a massive fan following world over. But, the real life inspiration for this entrepreneurial generation have been people like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezzos, Oprah Winfrey, Nandan Nilekani, Elon Musk etc. all of whom, hold a shared identity as – an ENTREPRENEUR.
But what exactly is an entrepreneur?
The Oxford dictionary describes an entrepreneur as “a person who sets up a business or businesses, taking on financial risks in the hope of profit”. While economist Joseph A. Schumpeter described in his words “The function of the entrepreneur is to reform or revolutionize the pattern of production by exploiting an invention or, more generally, an untried technological method of producing a new commodity or producing an old one in a new way, opening a new source of supply of materials or new outlet for products, by organizing a new industry (Schumpeter, 1972).
Above: image showing etymology of the word entrepreneur.
The term entrepreneur is French for ‘go-between’ i.e., ‘to undertake' and has been in use since the 12th century, with the earliest examples like Marco Polo- a merchant adventurer who embarked on legendary merchant trading expeditions and attempted to establish trade routes to the far east.
So basically, an entrepreneur could be anyone- from a teacher to a techie, a clockmaker to a coder – any individual who, rather than working as an employee for an institution, funds and runs her/his own business, assuming all the risks and returns of the venture.
Author
- chaithra