Bruyat, C., & Julien, P.-A. (2000). Defining the Field of Entrepreneurship.
Journal of Business Venturing, 16, 165-180. Summary by Sjuul Visschers
Empirical research: Empirical research is research that is based on observation and
measurement of phenomena, as directly experienced by the researcher. The data thus
gathered may be compared against a theory or hypothesis, but the results are still based on
real life experience.
“Is entrepreneurship just a buzzword, or does it have particular characteristics that can be
identified and studied?” The goal of this paper is to propose a definition of entrepreneurship
as a research field. Not propose a new defenition. Reformulate the proposals that are
already made by many researchers.
Different insights of researchers before:
Cantillon: The entrepreneur is someone who assumes the risk and may legitimately
appropriate any profits.
Turgot and Say: The entrepreneur is different from the capitalist, who assumes the risk or
uncertainly —the entrepreneur obtains and organizes production factors to create value.
Schumpeter: The entrepreneur performs the function of innovation that enables the liberal
system to persist by going beyond its contradictions.
Two trends on defining eship; in the first one, the entrepreneur is someone who creates and
develops new business of any kind. In the second, the entrepreneur is the innovator
(exceptional person who changes the economy). Also, the approach to the entrepreneur can
be purely functionalist: entrepreneurs are people who perform the function of reforming or
revolutionizing the productive system, and they continue to be entrepreneurs only for as long
as they continue to perform that function.
Defining the word is necessary, but is only useful if it can to be used to build theories and
carry out empirical research to further understand the phenomenon, and if it is shared by
researchers in the field to promote the gain of knowledge.
Basic ideas in the field of entrepreneurship:
Recognition of the individual as a vital element of creating value.
The individual is not a “machine” acting out on stimuli of the environment.
Resources in the environment play a stimulating role and increase the # of entrepreneurs in
a region.
New proposal: For us, the entrepreneur is the individual responsible for the process of
creating new value (an innovation and/or a new organization)—in other words, the individual
without whom the new value would not be created. > they do not use the word entrepreneur
unless real value is created. (you don’t call someone a successfull athlete without any
results.)
First, the individual creates a project > Individual (I) ⇒ New value creation (NVC), later the
project will shape and structure the individual > Individual (I) ⇔ New value creation (NVC) –
this causes a subject/object dialogic (=two or more object are combined to a single unit in a
complex way, with their duality still present in the combination). The object studied in the field
of entrepreneurship is the individual in this equation!
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