Entrepreneurship: Concept
Entrepreneurship is the process of identifying and developing economic, business and social opportunities (Shane & Venkatraman, 2000) through the efforts of individuals and organizations (Thornton & Yang, 2012), and it can be analyzed generating a multidimensional perspective (Bula, 2012). Entrepreneurship is the act of innovation involving endowing existing resources with new wealth-producing capacity (Drucker, 1985), as the nature of the decision-making context with entrepreneurs’ decisions (Alvarez & Barney, 2005). As a result, and applying a fundamentally personal perspective (Baum et al, 2007), «the entrepreneur is someone who is specialized in taking responsibility for and making judgmental decisions that affect the location, form, and the use of goods, resources or institutions» (Hébert & Link, 1989, p. 213).
Successful entrepreneurs must identify business opportunities (Stevenson & Jarillo, 1990; Barringer & Ireland, 2006; Timmons, 1999; Mariotti & Glackin, 2010) to create wealth, be able of choosing and managing entrepreneurial careers (Haynie & Shepherd, 2011), and be capable of acting entrepreneurially (McMullen & Shepherd, 2006; Shepherd & Patzelt, 2011) by being adapted to the market given their expertise (Velilla, Molina, & Ortega, 2018) and their capacity of resilience to failure. As a result, entrepreneurs are the business core of a company, especially in newly-born firms, where the act as inventors, investors, accountants, facilitators, organizational change specialists, leaders, technologists, and marketing specialists (Frese & Gielnik, 2014). Given the above definitions, entrepreneurship is defined as the type of business strategy focused on the creation of jobs, social wealth, and profit by optimizing the use of productive and commercial resources for economic growth (Saiz-Alvarez & García-Vaquero, 2017).
Entrepreneurship is associated with the «pursuit of the generation of value, through the creation or expansion of economic activity, by identifying and exploiting new products, processes or markets» (Ahmad & Seymour, 2008, p. 9). In this sense, Lumpkin and Dess (1996) assure that the essential act of entrepreneurship is launching startups and corporate venturing accomplished by entering into new or mature markets with new or existing goods and services. Entrepreneurial activities guided by some theories of entrepreneurship that will be analyzed in the next section.