ABSTRACT
The purpose of the chapter is to define the main elements which are necessary to the existence of a theory of the firm leaving some ‘room’ for an ‘entrepreneur’. Moreover we would like to define a very specific ‘entrepreneur’, i.e. a ‘knowledge-based’ entrepreneur. Our main argument will be to assume that such an entrepreneur can only have a role in a firm considered as a knowledge processor instead of an information processor. To consider a firm as a knowledge processor is in itself also a major challenge. The relevant analytical perspective changes: from a division of labour perspective to a division of knowledge one. The chapter is organized as follows: we start with a focused interpretation of the role of ‘entrepreneurs’ as viewed by economists, who did integrate them as a specific agent into their theories of the firm or of the organization, mainly Knight, Schumpeter, Winter and more recently Loasby. In Section 2, we plead for a Babbagian perspective of the division of labour in order to be able to consider properly the entrepreneurial dimension of firms as knowledge processors, and finally in Section 3 we reconsider the relevant role of the entrepreneur as a ‘knowledge-led entrepreneur’.
