Musings on Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Friday, October 03, 2003The Definition of Entrepreneurship
Today I had the good fortune to interview Andrew Field of PrintingForLess.com, Jeff Shuman of The Rhythm of Business, and George Gendron, the fomer editor-in-chief of Inc. who now teaches entrepreneurship at Clark University, as three-quarters of a virtual panel discussion on the essence of entrepreneurship prompted by an online suggestion by a visitor to the Pioneer Entrepreneurs web site. Something George said has me re-thinking how I tend to use the word entrepreneurship in an unnecessarily restrictive way. Though I'm a big fan of Amar Bhidé's framework for understanding different kinds of ventures, I've been troubled by my own tendency to categorize so-called promising startups as good and "marginal" business as, somehow, less worthy. The former are, no doubt, very important, but that doesn't mean that the latter category is somehow less significant. George's comments give me even more reason for pause.
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