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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