ABSTRACT
The field of entrepreneurship captures how enterprising individuals discover and appropriate opportunities to create new wealth. Focusing on the entrepreneur, this chapter advances the view that starting a new venture requires an assemblage of many individual-level factors, most broadly aggregated into knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs)—collectively, henceforth branded entrepreneurs’ competencies. Assuming all else equal,1 the stronger the competencies, the greater is the success of enterprising individuals2 (Baum, Locke, & Smith, 2001; Bird, 1988; Boyatzis, 1982; Chandler & Jansen, 1992; McClelland, 1961; Spencer & Spencer, 1983). This chapter builds on and extends existing research based on the reasoning that personal competencies do indeed play an important role in the entrepreneurial process. Although past literature on individual differences in entrepreneurship is instructive, it offers neither an inclusive theory nor practical guidance regarding what competencies are needed to start a new company. The framework of entrepreneurs’ competencies begins to address this issue. Developing a broader theory is important, given the substantial increase in entrepreneurial activity of the past decades and given the high failure rate of young ventures (and thus mounting costs). Put differently, new ventures are the product of individual-level action, and advancing a theory-however broad and rudimentary-on individual-level competencies may enhance our understanding of entrepreneurship.
