Recently, I’ve been teaching a subject at AFTRS on Entrepreneurial Finance. This has been a useful exercise in exploring ideas about what an entrepreneur is and who identifies as an entrepreneur. Before I outline a few ideas which have sprung from that class, I must thank my seven students who have been willing to be dragged in a new direction, as I moved the subject from being purely accounting based, to include looking at stories of entrepreneurship, to thinking about types of finance available and to pitching for finance. Their contributions have been insightful and informative.
In this subject, we have talked about entrepreneurship, but we’ve also been lucky enough to talk to four creative industries entrepreneurs about their careers and about what they do. This has resulted in an ongoing discussion about the personal attributes of entrepreneurs, such as risk-taking, passion, vision and perseverance. We have been hearing about the relationships between entrepreneurship and other social constructs, which seem to share the same space, like overlapping segments of a Venn diagram.
So, this post is a quick summary of a few thoughts about the interdependent relationships which entrepreneurship has with business, wealth and innovation. The blog equivalent of scribbled reminders on post-it notes.
Entrepreneurship and business
As part of Entrepreneurial Finance, I interviewed a film producer with a string of prominent feature credits to her name. Parallel to a successful producing career, she has also established, grew and sold a film related company. But when asked if she identified as an entrepreneur, she said no because in her view, to be an entrepreneur, you have to be in business.
The job of a film producer seems to me to be all business. It involves a range of tasks which are inherently entrepreneurial: raising finance, negotiating with talent, striking distribution deals and so on. Yet for my interviewee, this storm of production duties required to get a film made doesn’t feel like being in business. Business is not just busy-ness, but doing and something that looks and feels like a permanent, ongoing profit-making activity.
Are entrepreneurship and running a business essential companions? For me, the answer is no. I see entrepreneurship, and the ability to be entrepreneurial, active in a whole range of fields: in the arts, in not-for-profit organisations, in social enterprise. These are fields which may or may not be “in business.” Fields in which the participants (like this film producer) may not identify as being “in business.”
It seems to me like “entrepreneur” and “business person” are different roles. Like the person who has run a service station for thirty years, you can run a business without being an entrepreneur. Like someone who renovates and sells houses for profit, you can be an entrepreneur but not have a business. But there’s a set of implications about being in business – being self-directed, generating profit, financial risk taking, growing a company over time – which seems to sit comfortably alongside business as complementary ideas. They just seem like they go together, but they can and do exist separately.
(I’m grateful to my supervisor Kate Bowles for finding that term entrepreneur has its origins in 19th century France as “the manager or promoter of a theatre production.” Who’d have thought we’d have the creative industries to thank for the term?)
Entrepreneurship and wealth
Over on Radio National’s Big Ideas program, the Class Act podcast has detailed issues about Australia’s class system – insisting on its existence, detailing its complexity and talking about its effect on people and on. In its second episode, ANU’s Frank Bongiorno talks about the image of Australian entrepreneurs that developed in the 1980s. (Relevant section starts at 19 min 26 sec)
Australia became more unequal in the 1980s. Indeed, it was becoming more unequal from the 1970s, with the end of the long post war boom. And many of the long standing economic opportunities that existed within Australia, within industry and manufacturing, within the farm sector were closing off. During the 1980s, as Australia de-industrialised, as farm incomes and the farm economy came under increasing pressure, unemployment was very high, persistently high, much higher than today right through to the 1980s. Home ownership was declining and so, in many ways, that old image of Australia as a workers’ paradise or a working man’s paradise which goes right back to the 19th century… seems to be belied by the ways Australia was being transformed in the 1980s.
And so, you have the emergence of the figure of the entrepreneur, a term which was used in a non-pejorative way for most of the 1980s and then became more pejorative with the corporate collapses of the late 80s/early 90s and the recession. But you had this image really of the entrepreneur as a kind of public benefactor a public hero. Figures such as Alan Bond, for instance, or Robert Holmes à Court, Christopher Skase and they were held up as people to be emulated. The great irony of this, of course, is that it was a period of Labor government and, in many ways, the Hawke government and Paul Keating as treasurer held up these entrepreneurs as models to be emulated. They were new money as distinct from old money. They had a bit of “get up and go” about them. And, in many ways, a different kind of mass in popular culture where such figures, for the first time really in Australian history, I think, are being held up as real heroes. Their conspicuous consumption, their lavish lifestyles, were seen as admirable, because somehow or other we were able to share in them.
It is interesting to consider how our image of the entrepreneur in early 21st century Australia has changed since the time Bongiorno describes. Certainly, I think they are still held up as figures for emulation. We still think they have that bit of “get up and go” and that’s to be admired. But I think the connection to ostentatious displays of wealth is not so strong. The pervading image of an entrepreneur is much more likely to be of startup owners, app developers and hipsters in incubators. Their values seem to be presented as hard work, self-direction and innovation. Their wealth is mostly invisible and mostly presented, I’d suggest, as existing only as a future possibility.
We seem to have extended the definition of entrepreneur beyond the stratified giants of the AFR Rich List. But we’ve retained the idea of heroism and of an entrepreneur’s story being the highs, lows and ultimate triumph of the classic hero’s narrative.
One further thought: linking entrepreneurship and the drive to grow personal wealth is a challenge to the use of the term in the creative industries, where many activities are pursued without the desire to create wealth (in some cases, without the potential to create wealth). As noted previously, there’s a profit/not-for-profit divide within the creative industries and personal wealth creation sits on one side of it. Further, in the field of social entrepreneurship, I suspect it is absent entirely. It’s another example of how the concepts of wealth and entrepreneurship are drifting further apart from each other, through our wider definition of who an entrepreneur is.
Entrepreneurship and innovation
An ongoing conversation in Entrepreneurial Finance was around the role of innovation in entrepreneurship. One of my students, Daniel Punton, works in the startup space and saw innovation as fundamental; to be an entrepreneur, you must be creating something new. My discussion with Daniel and the rest of the class followed the stories told by our guest speakers, but also sprang from this definition of entrepreneurship from Howard Stephenson of Harvard Business School: “entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources controlled.” This definition, which doesn’t mention innovation, business or wealth, allows a wide range of activities to be classified as entrepreneurship.
But here’s another definition from Scott Shane and S. Venkataraman: “Entrepreneurship, as a field of business, seeks to understand how opportunities to create something new (e.g., new products or services, new markets, new production processes or raw materials, new ways of organizing existing technologies) arise and are discovered or created by specific individuals, who then use various means to exploit or develop them, thus producing a wide range of effects.” It mentions the word new five times, so they must really mean it.
For these researchers, newness can be explored in lots of different ways (it need not, for example, be a new product) but it is essential to entrepreneurship as a process. But how new is new? To take our aforementioned service station owner as an example, his business is not, a new idea. But the personal challenge of starting a business, the need to raise resources and to execute a strategy, may be a new opportunity for him/her. And if a service station in a new (geographic) market, for instance, could fit within Shane and Venkataraman’s definition, and certainly within Stephenson’s.
If we’re looking for a set formula for entrepreneurship, I don’t think we’ll find one. And, to speculate for a moment, the lack of a clear-cut definition seems to allow personal bias to influence perceptions of what entrepreneurship is. Viewed in this way, the extent to which any one aspect of entrepreneurship (newness, risk-taking, profit-making) is seen as essential, would be subjective, depending on each individual’s personal values. You might think of innovation as being essential to entrepreneurship, if you value innovation highly, and so forth. This allows Stephenson, Shane, Venkataraman and Punton to all be correct – but signals (another) a difficult definitional journey ahead.
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (2018). Part 2: How we got here. [podcast] Class Act. Available at: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/projects/class-act/ [Accessed 20 May 2018].
Baron, R. and S. Shane (2007). Entrepreneurship: A Process Perspective, Cengage Learning.
Eisenmann, T. (2013). Entrepreneurship: A Working Definition, HBR.org, available at: https://hbr.org/2013/01/what-is-entrepreneurship [Accessed 20 May 2018].
Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The Promise of Entrepreneurship as a Field of Research. The Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217-226. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/259271
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