ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship or the creation of new ventures through the identification and realization of opportunities can contribute to economic growth. However, it is this association with growth and especially the need to appropriate entrepreneurship and innovation within equilibrium models to explain in part the Solow residual for growth, that has, paradoxically, led to a neglect of the significant role and value of entrepreneurship. Growth, as Auserwald and Acs (2009) have argued, is not an end in itself, and the beginning and end of growth is opportunity. Identifying and realizing opportunity are dependent on the variegated dynamics of different social and economic conditions that allow for the emergence of different types of entrepreneurs who create new Schumpeterian combinations of economic and social activity. Their work leads to economic development, which by definition has different trajectories in countries and regions depending on the stages of their own development (see Porter and Schwab’s three-stage model which identifies factor, efficiency and innovation stages (Porter and Schwab, 2008)). These arguments are overlaid with theoretical contentions of opportunities as exogenous in the entrepreneurship literature and as endogenous in the literature on innovation (Acs and Audrtesch, 2005).
