ABSTRACT
The journey through the world of women entrepreneurs in the previous chapters illustrates the dynamics of venture initiation and growth that characterize all entrepreneurial activity. They also speak to the specific opportunities and challenges faced by women entrepreneurs when compared to men, and the impact of the institutional context in developing and emerging economies. In his 1911 book, The Theory of Economic Development, Joseph Schumpeter presented the entrepreneur as the hero of the market economy. Decades later, in his famous book, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy ([1942] 1975: 82), he argued that
Capitalism [. . .] is by nature a form or method of economic change and not only never is but never can be stationary. The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the capitalist engine in motion comes from the new consumers’ goods, the new methods of production or transportation, the new markets, the new forms of industrial organization that capitalist enterprise creates. [. . .] The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation [. . .] that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
