The Search for Entrepreneurship

Since the 1980s, governments have often sought to encourage entrepreneurship on the assumption that it creates small businesses as the primary drivers of job creation. As a result, entrepreneurship has become a valid subject for academic research attracting extensive funding. Despite this explosion of scholarship, there is no accepted model of how entrepreneurship operates or even a commonly accepted definition of what it is. Simon Bridge posits that this is because entrepreneurship has been studied based on the false assumption that it exists as a specific discrete identifiable phenomenon operating in accordance with consistent, predictable ‘rules’. So this misdirected search has produced more questions than answers. Accepting that entrepreneurship as we have conceived it does not exist could lead to new and valuable insights into what the different forms of entrepreneurship are and how they might be influenced. Scholars, advanced students and policy makers will find this a thought-provoking insight into the misconceptions of ‘entrepreneurship’.