Entrepreneurship and Competitive Advantage

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Economist Joseph Schumpeter from Austria presented a image of the entrepreneur as someone driven by the ‘dream and the will to found a private kingdom’, the ‘will to conquer: the impulse to fight, to prove oneself superior to others’, and the ‘joy of creating. ’ (Schumpeter, J., 1975). Ideally, the entrepreneur is “inspired to alter an undesirable state of events and starts to think creatively (usually in an out-of-the-box way) on a solution, takes action in a courageous way, despite the risks, and persists until the solution is generally accepted. Schumpeter sees the entrepreneur as an agent of change within the larger economy”. (Schumpeter, J., 1975) Peter Drucker, on the other hand, does not see entrepreneurs as essentially mediators of change themselves, but rather as exploiters of change. According to Drucker, ‘the entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity.’(Drucker, P., 1975) (Lumpkin and Dess, 1996) defined entrepreneurship as ‘new entry’ that enters ‘new or established markets with new or existing goods or services’. For (Frank Knight, 1967), “entrepreneurship is about taking risk. The behavior of the entrepreneur reflects a kind of person willing to put his or her career and financial security on the line and take risks in the name of an idea, spending much time as well as capital on an uncertain venture. In circumstances that are inconvenient, uncomfortable and below par, where others may see an inconvenience to be tolerated, an entrepreneur sees this condition as an opportunity to create something new, using the characteristics of inspiration, creativity, action, courage, and persistence”. Whatever the view on entrepreneurship may be, a business is a business and its bottom line purpose is to be profitable. According to Michael Porter, the Bishop Lawrence University Professor at Harvard Business

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