Who is an entrepreneur? And who isn’t? Is an entrepreneur really all that different from the rest of us? What are the character traits that make his or her work so difficult without the guarantee of success or the stability of employment? Is there a distinction between the founder of a business and an entrepreneur? Is each new business an entrepreneurial project?
In the literature, the term entrepreneur sometimes refers to anyone who owns or manages a business, while at other times, the definition is a lot more fine-tuned.
For Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950), who was considered the father of the economy of innovation, the entrepreneur represents one of the three main pillars in his approach. “He defines the entrepreneur as a creative being who finds new ideas, swims against the current, breaks routine, and innovates by finding new ways to create value. For him, the entrepreneur acts as the propellor of growth within a competitive market and not the politics of the state. For Schumpeter, the owner of a business who does nothing more than manage pre-developed ideas is not an entrepreneur, he becomes one when he takes risks to innovate.” André Citroën, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos or even Mark Zuckerberg are all fairly good examples of Shchumpeter’s definition of an entrepreneur.
According to Harvey Leibenstein (1922-1994), “the main objective of the entrepreneur consists of discovering the gap between what customers expect and what is currently offered. Entrepreneurs must therefore be ready to develop new products or processes designed to close the perceived gap in the market.”
In “The Innovator’s DNA ” published by Dyer, Gregersen and Clyton Christensen in 2011, we learn that these researchers conducted their work over a period of 8 years with 100 innovators and company founders who were at the origin of revolutionary products resulting from disruptive or radical innovations. Researchers have discovered what they call the innovator’s DNA. This DNA is composed of 5 behavioral elements:
The first is questioning, (why, why not and if we did it this way or that way) In fact, the curiosity of these people is so strong that it pushes them to always shake up the status quo.
The second element is observation of the environment “of their potential clients” as if they were anthropologists. These people know that they have to get out of their environment and get very close to their customers’ environment in the hope of discovering surprises that will lead them to propose new product ideas.
The third element is the strategic use of their network of contacts. These people are very active on their networks and they are not afraid to expose their ideas to criticism from people with opposing views. The objective is to learn to adjust their ideas.
The fourth element is experimentation. Entrepreneurs have a sense of experimentation and this point is fundamental in the validation of a solution.
The fifth element consists of having the intellectual capacity to associate these 4 elements together, to synthesize them and generate insights to solve problems observed. This is what empiricist philosophers call associative thinking.
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