Who are Entrepreneurs?

Most definitions about who is or is not an entrepreneur are unhelpful, because they are descriptive in nature and provide no basis for taking action. We take a rather broad approach to defining an entrepreneur, but to understand our definition, including the difference between business owner and entrepreneur, we must introduce the concept of a Pipeline.

The concept of a Pipeline of Entrepreneurs and Enterprises is a way to effectively segment the marketplace of businesses and differentiate among the various business assets within our communities. Once segmented in this way, it becomes possible to methodically decide when, where and how to invest in entrepreneurship as a cross cutting economic development strategy.

The pipeline contains two major variables:

    * (a) skill level of the entrepreneur and
    * (b) stages in the development of the business (i.e., life cycle).

These two variables can be combined to give us a new set of lenses or map by which to view the community’s business assets.

of a pipeline represents an idealized map of the entrepreneurs and enterprises in a community. Although economic data is not categorized in ways that can easily lend themselves to this kind of analysis, this map is a useful way of organizing and interpreting the information that is available, and understanding the dynamics in the community.

Key Observations:

   1. A transformation is required to move to another cell in the pipeline.
   2. Entrepreneurship and innovation is an issue at every cell in the pipeline.
   3. The needs of entrepreneurs and enterprises at EACH segment of the pipeline are different as is the services and infrastructure necessary to support them.
   4. The pipeline allows us to broaden our definition of the “business assets” in our communities with which we can work. By arbitrarily limiting the definition of who is an entrepreneur or at what stage in its lifecycle an enterprise can be entrepreneurial, we are missing valuable opportunities to expand our portfolio to include corporate entrepreneurs working within existing companies, “managers” of strategic alliances between companies, owners of declining firms who desire to reinvent their business, and existing companies who want to grow through new product development or product extensions.
   5. Entrepreneurship, defined as the ability to identify and capture a “market” opportunity, can exist in many different domains, such as science, art, music and sports. Mozart, Picasso and Leonardo da Vinci were all entrepreneurs in their fields. Each one of them literally re-defined the rules of the game.
   6. The difference between a business owner (in our opinion) and an entrepreneur is that a business owner is comfortable operating within the segment of the pipeline that they currently occupy, and an entrepreneur is not – they want to move to another part of the pipeline, to grow or develop. Being an entrepreneur is a choice, and an individual can shift from being an entrepreneur to business owner and back, at any time.