ABSTRACT
All across the world, from the micro-entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to the high-tech entrepreneurs in the Silicon Valley, people start new businesses or engage in self-employed work. Entrepreneurship has been an important field in economics and business science, at least since Joseph Schumpeter (1912) put forward the concept of entrepreneurs being the key drivers of innovation and economic development. Several scholars view differences in the frequency and quality of entrepreneurial actions as key factors which explain economic divergence in the global economy (Audretsch and Thurik 2000; Santos 2004; Szirmai et al. 2011). The key question in economics has been how entrepreneurship contributes to economic growth. Other questions have arisen as a result of the rise of microfinance and the concept of social-entrepreneurship, questions concerning issues such as what effect entrepreneurship has on people’s social choices and human capabilities or what entrepreneurship means for the freedom and well-being of the entrepreneur and for society (Bornstein 2004; Yunus 2007; Gries and Naude 2010). Learning from the traditional approaches of Schumpeter (as well as taking recent network-based entrepreneurship research into account) can be helpful in addressing such questions.
