ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship has been most associated with start-up ventures, innovation, risk taking, and profit making in the private sector. Although some of the elements of public entrepreneurship have been around for many years, it was not until the 1980s that a few public administrators began to refer to themselves as public entrepreneurs. The most notable of them, Ted Gaebler, former city manager of Visalia, California, went on to help establish the reinventing government movement with the publication of Reinventing Government. This book expanded the notion of entrepreneurial public administration to include a focus on the customer, decentralized government structures, empowerment of employees and communities, a catalyst role for government, and mission-driven organizations. Entrepreneurial public administration can be viewed as either economic entrepreneurship or political or policy entrepreneurship. Some democratic theorists have argued that the philosophy of entrepreneurial public administration and some of the techniques of the entrepreneurial management style conflict with democratic values such as public accountability and citizen input.
