By: Alaa Rady
I take part in so many development projects concerning entrepreneurship, with different NGOs like Nahdet El Mahrousa, Endeavour, Techno-Serve, as well as projects under the AM Cham on entrepreneurship. What I realized is that every time we are talking about an abstract topic that everyone defines in his own way that differs from the person sitting next to him! So let me start my first article on the topic by “Defining Entrepreneurship”. Jean-Baptiste Say, a French economist, is believed to have coined the word “entrepreneur” first in about 1800. He said an entrepreneur is “one who undertakes an enterprise, especially a contractor, acting as intermediary between capital and labour.” (Wikipedia) Entrepreneurship is defined in many different ways within academic literature. Different schools emerged having different definitions (Cunningham et al. 1991) like the “great person school” focusing on intuitive entrepreneurs within start-up situations; the “psychological characteristics school” focusing on the entrepreneurs’ values, attitudes and needs within start-up situations; the “classical school” focusing on innovation within start-ups and early growth situations; the “management school” defining entrepreneurs as organizers of an economic ventures, who organize, own, manage, and assume the risk within early growth and maturity ventures; the “leadership school” defining entrepreneurs as leaders mobilizing others within early growth and maturity ventures; and finally the “entrepreneurship school” defining entrepreneurship as the development of independent units to create, market and expand services within mature ventures. Some academic work tried to shift the unit of analysis from the individual level to the functional level (Gartner 1989) defining it as “entrepreneurship is the creation of new organizations”; while some later research disagrees (McKenzie et al. 2007) trying to combine the latter definition with others and results in the following definition “entrepreneurship involves individuals and groups of individuals seeking and exploiting economic opportunity”. The largest piece of research ever conducted on entrepreneurship is the GEM report (Bosma et al. 2009), depicting an outstanding global effort, gathering data from
54 countries, conducting yearly interviews that amounted to 180,000 in 2009. The GEM report defines an Entrepreneur as someone who embarks on a new venture for a minimum of 3 months, paying salaries (as a sign of commitment), and up to 42 months when he becomes Owner-Manager of an Established Business. I believe this definition, which is very close to the
concept of “new start-ups” depicted already in the VC industry and well covered in different research within the finance arena, will prevail as the main definition going forward in future research; not because of its superiority in quality, or its closeness or relatedness to other scholars’ opinions; but rather because of the size of the global database built by the research, that will serve as basis to so many other scholars in their
future work on entrepreneurship.

For my personal opinion on the topic, I think the lack of a common definition on entrepreneurship is a major issue since we are not talking about the same thing! Is it about a person or a new venture? Is it about high impact high growth or about grass root development? Does it include social work, political work, and corporate intrapreneurship? Is growth measured in revenues or profits, or number of people employed? Are we talking about micro-enterprises, or SMEs or large corporations to be? Where are the lines separating entrepreneurship from VC work, from SMEs, and from mere self employment? Unless we agree on a definition, the topic will not build up from the academic point of view, as the whole field of academia relies on pieces of research and papers building on each other’s findings to add value to the whole field of academia; and unless we agree on a common definition, we will not whom to target in terms of capacity building, financing...

To conclude, Entrepreneurship is indeed an abstract concept that crosses different disciplines from micro-ventures, to SMEs to large corporations. I would personally define entrepreneurship as the act of establishing a “new venture” by an individual or a group of individuals or corporations, either from scratch, or building up on personal or corporate synergies, to exploit an economic or social opportunity, taking considerable personal/corporate risk to do so. As an example I would not consider P&G entrepreneurial by launching a new blue soap as line extension to other colour soaps they already sell, while I would consider it entrepreneurial under a group of young risktakers who commit a large part of their resources to do so from scratch to fulfil a market need competing with multinational tycoons.

My advice to end this article is for every conversation on entrepreneurship to agree on what they mean by this abstract term of entrepreneurship, before engaging in lively discussions and debates realizing in the end, that we are not speaking the same language!

References
1) Cunningham, J. Barton & Lischeron, Joe (1991) “Defining Entrepreneurship”, Journal of Small Business Management, 29 (1): 45-61
2) Gartner, W. 1989. Who Is an Entrepreneur?” Is the Wrong Question. Entrepreneurship: Theory & Practice, Vol. 13 Issue 4, p47-68, 22p
3) McKenzie, Brian; Ugbah, Steve D.; Smothers, Norman. 2007. Who is an entrepreneur? Is it still the wrong question? Academy of Entrepreneurship Journal, 13 (1): 23-43,
4) Ireland, D.; Reutzel, C.; Webb, J. 2005. Entrepreneurship Research in the AMJ: What Has Been Published, and What Might the Future Hold? Academy of Management Journal. 48, (4); 556-578.
5) Bosma N. & Hardings R. GEM Global Report 2009. On line access: http://www.gemconsortium.org/