The Entrepreneur Defined
What exactly is an entrepreneur? Jeff Cornwall, the Director of the Belmont University Center for Entrepreneurship, finally answers the question that may still be plaguing you:
- The process of innovation that goes on in large companies is not entrepreneurship.
This flies in the face of what I wrote about in my first book, Organizational Entrepreneurship, in 1990. But, I have come to believe that entrepreneurship should be about what individuals do, not the collective strategy of corporations. This leads to me second boundary.
- Entrepreneurship includes only privately held businesses.
An IPO is an event that takes a business out the realm of being an entrepreneurial venture. Once a business “goes public,” everything changes. The culture will begin to change. The objectives will change. Once a business uses public funding, it begins to become a public good. It is no longer about an owner/operator running her business. The founding entrepreneur becomes a corporate executive following the wishes of the public shareholders of the business. As many entrepreneurs quickly learn, once their business went through an IPO it was no longer their business to be run based on their aspirations, their values and their goals. They became administrators of a business owned by others.
- Not all privately held businesses are entrepreneurial ventures.
Succession to the next generation in a family business, an ESOP, or other internal ownership transfers from the founding entrepreneur to other internal owners takes these businesses out of the boundaries of entrepreneurship. On the other hand, I think that someone who buys an existing business as an outsider is an entrepreneur in that act.
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