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The People Who Make U.S. Products

‘World News’ Series highlights the men and women who make American products.

The American Entrepreneur Can Be Unstoppable

According to Wikipedia, an entrepreneur is a person who has possession of a new enterprise, venture or idea and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to the type of personality who is willing to take upon herself or himself a new venture or enterprise and accepts full responsibility for the outcome. 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 intermediatory between capital and labour.”

Background

Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, resulting in many new ventures failing. The word entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service, by carving out a niche in the market that may not exist currently. Entrepreneurs tend to identify a market opportunity and exploit it by organizing their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions within a given sector. Effective entrepreneurs may influence investors, suppliers, and partners through an elevator pitch about their idea.

Observers see them as being willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue opportunity.

Business entrepreneurs are viewed as fundamentally important in the capitalistic society. Some distinguish business entrepreneurs as either “political entrepreneurs” or “market entrepreneurs,” while social entrepreneurs’ principal objectives include the creation of a net social benefit.[citation needed]
[edit] As a leader

Scholar Robert. B. Reich considers leadership, management ability, and team-building as essential qualities of an entrepreneur. This concept has its origins in the work of Richard Cantillon in his Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général (1755) and Jean-Baptiste Say (1803 or 1834) in his Treatise on Political Economy.

A more generally held theory is that entrepreneurs emerge from the population on demand, from the combination of opportunities and people well-positioned to take advantage of them. An entrepreneur may perceive that they are among the few to recognize or be able to solve a problem. In this view, one studies on one side the distribution of information available to would-be entrepreneurs (see Austrian School economics) and on the other, how environmental factors (access to capital, competition, etc.), change the rate of a society’s production of entrepreneurs.

A prominent theorist of the Austrian School in this regard is Joseph Schumpeter, who saw the entrepreneur as innovators and popularized the uses of the phrase creative destruction to describe his view of the role of entrepreneurs in changing business norms. Creative destruction dealt with the changes entrepreneurial activity makes every time a new process, product or company enters the market.
[edit] Research into entrepreneurs

Schumpeter argues that the entrepreneur is an innovator, one that introduces new technologies into the workplace or market, increasing efficiency, productivity or generating new products or services (Deakins and Freel 2009). Other academics such as Say, Casson and Cantillon, say the entrepreneur is an organiser of factors or production that acts as a catalyst for economic change (Deakins and Freel, 2009). Shackle argues that the entrepreneur is a highly creative individual that imagines new solutions providing new opportunities for reward (Deakins and Freel, 2009). These are a few definitions from the entrepreneurship field but show the complexity and lack of cohesion between academic research (Gartner, 2001). Most research focuses on the traits of the entrepreneur. Cope (2001) argues that although certain entrepreneurial traits are required the entrepreneurs behaviour are dynamic and influenced by environmental factors.

Shane and VenKataraman (2000) argue the entrepreneur is solely concerned with opportunity recognition and exploitation; however, the opportunity that is recognised depends on the type of entrepreneur which Ucbasaran et al (2001) argue there are many different types of dependant on their business and personal circumstances.
[edit] Social Entrepreneur

Social entrepreneurs act within a market aiming to create social value through the improvement of goods and services offered to the community. Their main aim is to help offer a better service improving the community as a whole and are predominately run as non profit schemes. To support this point Zahra et al (2009: 519) said that “social entrepreneurs make significant and diverse contributions to their communities and societies, adopting business models to offer creative solutions to complex and persistent social problems”. Examples of socially run businesses include the NHS and also the ‘Love One Water’ drinks brand.

Howard Robard Hughes, Jr. (December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976) was an American aviator, industrialist, film producer/director, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained fame in the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big budget and often controversial films like Hell’s Angels, Scarface, and The Outlaw.

As an aviator, Hughes set multiple world air-speed records (for which he won many awards, including the Congressional Gold Medal), built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 “Hercules” aircraft, and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines. Hughes’ legacy is still visible through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and he remains one of the most influential aviators in American history.