ABSTRACT

Entrepreneurs innovate. Innovation is the specifi c instrument of entrepreneurship. It is the act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth. Innovation, indeed, creates a resource. There is no such thing as a ‘resource’ until man fi nds a use for something in nature and thus endows it with economic value. Until then, every plant is a weed and every mineral just another rock. Not much more than a century ago, neither mineral oil seeping out of the ground nor bauxite, the ore of aluminium, were resources. They were nuisances; both render the soil infertile. The penicillin mould was a pest, not a resource. Bacteriologists went to great lengths to protect their bacterial cultures against contamination by it. Then in the 1920s, a London doctor, Alexander Fleming, realized that this ‘pest’ was exactly the bacterial killer bacteriologists had been looking for – and the penicillin mould became a valuable resource.