An entrepreneur is a person who has possession over a company, enterprise, or venture, and assumes significant accountability for the inherent risks and the outcome. The term is 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. In common understanding it is taken as describing a dynamic personality.
An entrepreneur is an individual who efficiently and effectively combines the four factors of production. Those factors are land (natural resources), labor (human input into production using available resources), capital (any type of equipment used in production i.e. machinery) and Enterprise (intelligence, knowledge, and creativity.) (Kuratko, D.F & Hodgetts, R.M., (2001) Entrepreneurship - A Contemporary Approach. 5th ed. Harcourt College Publishers.)
Entrepreneurship is often difficult and tricky, as many new ventures fail. Entrepreneur is often synonymous with founder. Most commonly, the term entrepreneur applies to someone who creates value by offering a product or service. Entrepreneurs often have strong beliefs about a market opportunity and organize their resources effectively to accomplish an outcome that changes existing interactions.
Some observers see them as being willing to accept a high level of personal, professional or financial risk to pursue that opportunity, but the emerging evidence indicates they are more passionate experts than gamblers.
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 social and/or environmental benefit.
Definition and terminology
An entrepreneur is someone who attempts to organize resources in new and more valuable ways and accepts full responsibility for the outcome.
Etymology
The word "entrepreneur" is a loanword from French. In French the verb "entreprendre" means "to undertake", with "entre" coming from the Latin word meaning "between", and "prendre" meaning "to take". In French a person who performs a verb, has the ending of the verb changed to "eur", comparable to the "er" ending in English.
Enterprise is similar to and has roots in, the French word "entreprise", which is the past participle of "entreprendre". Entrepreneuse is simply the French feminine counterpart of "entrepreneur".
According to Miller, it is one who is able to begin, sustain, and when necessary, effectively and efficiently dissolve a business entity.
