Why entrepreneurship is important to the economy

Entrepreneurship is often cited as a major engine of economic growth, particularly in the United States. But the actual picture is more complicated. Here’s what leading scholars have to say about the importance of entrepreneurship around the world.

Entrepreneurship is a general, blanket term related to starting a business. But its precise definition has long been a matter of debate among scholars and policymakers.

“Despite widespread interest in the topic and a broad recognition of its importance to the economy, there remains a lack of consensus about how to specifically define entrepreneurship,” the nonpartisan Center for American Entrepreneurship notes. “’Entrepreneur’ is an English derivation of the French word ‘entreprendre’ (to undertake), leaving wide latitude for interpretation and application.”

Howard Stevenson, known as “the godfather of entrepreneurship studies” at Harvard Business School (HBS), has defined it as the “pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.” As fellow HBS professor Tom Eisenmann elaborates, “’beyond resources controlled’ implies resource constraints. At a new venture’s outset, its founders control only their own human, social, and financial capital. Many entrepreneurs bootstrap: they keep expenditures to a bare minimum while investing only their own time and, as necessary, their personal funds.”

The Stanford Center for Professional Development at Stanford University offers a somewhat simpler definition: “At its most basic level, entrepreneurship refers to an individual or a small group of partners who strike out on an original path to create a new business. An aspiring entrepreneur actively seeks a particular business venture and it is the entrepreneur who assumes the greatest amount of risk associated with the project. As such, this person also stands to benefit most if the project is a success.”

Innovation and entrepreneurship undeniably contribute to economic growth, making them a particular area of interest for economists and policymakers worldwide.

However, some scholars say that the growth created by entrepreneurship can be exaggerated.

For one thing, growth from entrepreneurial activity doesn’t occur evenly across an economy. Studies of economic growth have pointed toward an apparent paradox in which the growth in productivity overall in the U.S. has been only modest in recent years, despite the pervasiveness of entrepreneurship, innovation, and innovation ideology. According to studies by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), this is because innovation affects industries very differently, having a large impact in some sectors of the economy but little impact in others. While generally positive, the link between entrepreneurship and improving societal welfare is also complicated, influenced by factors such as regional population, entrepreneurship density, and the specific industry in which the entrepreneurial activity is taking place, according to the scholarly literature.

What’s more, some studies have suggested that economic growth may be correlated to an increase in overall inequality in certain circumstances. Scholars say that in the US income inequality and economic growth have been linked since the 1970s.

One interesting way to look at entrepreneurship is to divide it into two broad categories.

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