ABSTRACT
The work of Joseph Schumpeter on entrepreneurship has been severely neglected in recent decades. It is almost as if his prediction that the entrepreneurial function would become routine (and therefore no longer ‘entrepreneurial’ as he originally conceived of it) also became his own death wish in academic discourse. In fact, Schumpeter’s predictions about the ‘death’ of entrepreneurship were not just premature but indeed based on a false conceptualization of the dynamics of late industrial and post industrial society. Despite the emergence of routine funding for R & D, advanced industrial societies today have not provided a routine solution for the problem of how this R & D can be commercialized and serve the function of increasing productivity, which Schumpeter insisted was the key role of the entrepreneur and the essential ingredient of exponential growth as distinct from arithmetic growth. Exponential or dynamic growth requires innovative combinations of the factors of production, in contrast to arithmetic growth that arises from simply increasing the volume of inputs into production.
