What is Entrepreneurship (according to Per Davidsson) ?

What is entrepreneurship? Mmm... here's a vast question.

It is also quite a central one for me, and I therefore read carefully what Per Davidsson has written about it. Below are my observations.


He's definition has a good point according to me: it can be summarized clearly and shortly. Therefore he can easily state whether something belongs to entrepreneurship or not by simply taking what he is studying and checking if it fits his criterion.

I found interesting how he shows that entrepreneurship is something different: it belongs to the "work" part of one's life, but unlike many other jobs it also touches the leisure time. The limit between the two worlds tends to vanish when we talk about entrepreneurship, and I'd say it does even more since for me entrepreneurship is a bit of a life style.

I was also very interested by his concept of "micro-level actor", which means that changes are brought by a few, who do what they can where they are. He put back the outside conditions (policies, laws and all) at their right place: a scene, a background, not actors.

On the other hand sometimes his definition seems too restrictive: I would tend to disagree when he says that one cannot talk about entrepreneurship when change occurs within a company for example... Or when writes it has to influence others' behaviors...
For me entrepreneurship occurs from the moment one creates something new, does something.

I also found something that surprised me (or maybe it is that I didn't quite understand it): Davidsson says it is not relevant to study what kind of person one has to be to be a successful entrepreneur, but on the other hand he explains that we have to study the entrepreneurial behavior...
I agree when he stresses that there is no "you're good at that" or "you can't, just give up" but our personality dictates our behavior, doesn't it? So how to study a behavior without the
personality behind?...

I'll conclude this part about Per Davidsson's work with the two views his exposes about opportunity recognition: either we start a business with an externally-recognized opportunity, or with an internally-recognized one.
I'd say I find myself in both cases: I've been wanting to start a business for a while now, without any clear idea of which domain I'd work in (just for the "sake of it", one could say).
On the other hand, I've been building up things so far according to what I liked and wanted to do.
However, in the latter case, it (almost) never brought to me any revenue... So I guess that, with the actual definition of entrepreneurship we have, I'm still in the 1st category of opportunity recognition.


Now, before ending this entry (and sorry for those who have to read me and give a comment! ^^), I wanted to add a last word about the entrepreneurial games we have. So far we played only one, but I found it really nice!
I think we can learn a lot from these things: 1/ About entrepreneurship (that's the point after all!), but also 2/ About ourselves, like what are our strengths and weaknesses, what can we rely on and what do we have to improve (I'm referring to the different steps of the game today: analyzing, creating, promoting and the rest. Some of us are more creative, some manage to get to the point easily...), and at last 3/ About team work, discovering what are our social skills, which role we play in the team, and so on...


Ok, that's it for today!
Thanks for reading and see you around!

David