ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurs are, like elephants, easier to recognise than to define. They are the prime motors of economic activity: it is the entrepreneur who recognises opportunities and assembles the resources, people, capital and premises, to exploit them in a firm. That is clear enough; in fact it is the popular understanding of the term. The difficulties arise when we try to put the entrepreneur under the economist’s microscope to analyse her precise functions and separate them out from those of the owners of capital, the sources of invention, the managers of the firm and all the other elements of business activity. When you do this you are left with an abstraction – yet a vital one, the ‘soul in the machine’, as it were.
