When people talk about entrepreneurship, they almost always use the word 'risk'. It's often said that entrepreneurs are "risk-takers," and as a result, they're often characterized as risk-lovers. It's true that you'll probably find some entrepreneurs who wholeheartedly enjoy that thrilling facet of the process, however, characterizing entrepreneurs as a group as people who only enjoy a thrill would be pretty narrow-minded, and also false.
Exploration of the concepts of entrepreneurship and risk (and the relationship between the two) was the central task of a working paper published in 2005 by Brian Wu, of The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, and Anne Marie Knott, of the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Virginia. Wu and Knott's paper, entitled "Entrepreneurial Risk and Market Entry," discussed the work of F.H. Knight, who elaborated on earlier discussions of the matter by identifying entrepreneurs as important economic players, not as thrill-seeking risk-takers.
Wu and Knott pointed out that as the market developed, entrepreneurs served a crucial role as "undertakers" of important tasks at all levels of society. But perhaps the most striking observation the authors make is that entrepreneurs were (and continue to be) those individuals that are willing to take risks in order to innovate new and better ways of doing things. Entrepreneurs are those that, faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles, take the risk because the reward is a better way of life not just for the entrepreneur, but society as a whole.
This brings me to the subject of social entrepreneurship, which is a huge topic to cover in one post (which is why I won't). Does it seem a bit redundant to anyone else to use the term "social entrepreneurship"? It seems to me that the root of entrepreneurship is social-- that is, it's based on interaction and social life. It's one person identifying the need of a group of people, the available resources and the desired outcome and trying to reach that goal with whatever tools/resources he or she has available. In this way, entrepreneurship is less about risk taking than it is about vision building. For whatever reason, the social experiences entrepreneurs combine with the intellectual skills they possess and produce an ability to visualize the desired innovation or outcome.
It's probably true that we've come to think of entrepreneurs a little differently than how they began--as the "undertaker class" outlined in Wu and Knott's article, people like farmers, merchants, and craftspeople. But, as with anything, there is an evolution of terminology that is based on history, society, and the market. The excess of the 1980's and the explosion (and implosion) of start-ups in the late 1990's have made the roots of entrepreneurship worthy of further evaluation, particular how their skills can be best utilized during tough economic times.
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