Steven Paul Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft - Case Study Example

Many "high-profile" entrepreneurial ventures seek venture capital or angel funding in order to raise capital to build the business. Many kinds of organizations now exist to support would-be entrepreneurs, including specialized government agencies, business incubators, science parks, and some NGOs. Wikipedia attributes much of the understanding of entrepreneurship to the work of economist Joseph Schumpeter and the Austrian School of economics. In Schumpeter (1950), an entrepreneur is a person who is willing and able to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation.

Entrepreneurship forces "creative destruction" across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and business models. In this way, creative destruction is largely responsible for the dynamism of industries and long-run economic growth. Despite Schumpeter's early 20th century contributions, the traditional microeconomic theory of economics has had little room for entrepreneurs in its theoretical frameworks (instead of assuming that resources would find each other through a price system).

Entrepreneurship received a boost in the formalised creation of so-called incubators and science parks, where businesses can start at a small scale, share services and space while they grow, and eventually move into space of their own when they have achieved a large enough scale to be viable stand-alone businesses. It is being encouraged in an effort to revitalise fading downtowns and inner cities in America, which may have excellent resources but suffer from a lack of spirited development. (Wikipedia) For Frank H.

Knight (1967) and Peter Drucker (1970) entrepreneurship is about taking the risk. The behaviour 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. (Wikipedia) Still another view of entrepreneurship, according to Wikipedia, is that it is the process of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities in the form of new business ventures.

In this paradigm, an entrepreneur could be defined as "someone who acts with ambition beyond that supportable by the resources currently under his control, in relentless pursuit of opportunity" (a definition common to entrepreneurship professors Howard Stevenson and Jeffry Timmons).