The Integrative Stream

So just who are these entrepreneurs?

Jeff Cornwall provides A Definition of Entrepreneurship at The Entrepreneurial Mind and apologizes for not having gotten around to it sooner. It’s a pretty good defintion, so go read the post.

The economic history of entrepreneurship is an undertreated subject. When I was an undergraduate, I did dual majors on Economics and History. It’s a fascinating area, and I was a little surprised that out of 1,200 undergraduates I was the only one my year who chose to do that. While I put my nascent career as an economic historian on the back burner, I did write a seminar paper on Adam Smith and the concept of entrepreneurship, the gist of which was that (a) Adam Smith never used the word and (b) when he alluded to entrepreneurs it wasn’t respectfully.

The word itself, as far as I can tell, goes back to Richard Cantillon in the 1730s, and the concept another century. Smith tended to use words like “projector,” which is just a breath away from “speculator.”