Enterprise and Entrepreneurs

Abstract

Every improvement in technique results from the adoption by somebody, somewhere, of some new method. The individuals who make such improvements are innovators, and often loosely described as entrepreneurs. Strictly speaking the word describes a role found only in a capitalist system, which is therefore widely assumed to be more or less immoral. Yet it is not only advocates of capitalist production who discuss the presence or absence of entrepreneurship in non-industrial societies with the implication that it is a desirable quality.