Definition Of Entrepreneurship By Authors

Getting Your Definitions Right When Writing Literature Reviews

I spent three weeks last year trying to reconcile five different definitions of entrepreneurship for a review paper, only to realize I had been comparing apples to oranges the entire time. The problem isn't that the definitions are wrong. The problem is that almost nobody stops to check what category each author is actually working in before they start citing them side by side. Here is how I got my head around it.

Definition Of Entrepreneurship By Authors: A Practical Framework

The definitions you'll find in the literature aren't competing answers to one question. They're answers to different questions that just happen to use the same word. Peter Drucker was talking about entrepreneurship as a discipline of innovation. William Gartner was arguing it's about the behavior of the entrepreneur, not the venture itself. Howard Stevenson at Harvard defined it as the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources currently controlled. These aren't contradictions. They're different entry points into the same messy concept. If you want to use these definitions properly in your own work, the first step is to classify them before you quote them. I use a simple two-axis framework: is the definition focused on the person or the process, and is it normative (telling you what entrepreneurship should be) or descriptive (telling you what it is)? Drucker is normative and process-oriented. Gartner is descriptive and person-oriented. Stevenson sits somewhere in between as a resource-constrained behavioral definition. I once had a reviewer reject my paper because I'd cited Gartner and Stevenson in the same paragraph without explaining why their definitions pointed in different directions. The reviewer was technically right, even if they were being difficult. I added a single paragraph mapping the tension between those two definitions and the rest of the review went smoothly after that.

The Definitions That Actually Matter

Kazanjian defined entrepreneurship as a process of creating wealth through the creation of new organizations. This one gets overlooked because it sounds almost too clean. What people miss is that Kazanjian was specifically trying to separate entrepreneurship from intrapreneurship and small business management, which most general definitions lump together. If you're studying startup formation in established firms, his definition gives you a clear boundary condition that most others don't. Shane and Venkataraman framed it as the scholarly art of discovering, evaluating, and exploiting opportunities. Their definition is influential precisely because it's narrow. They deliberately restricted the field to opportunity-centric analysis and argued that the real gap in entrepreneurship research was explaining why some people notice opportunities that others miss. It's a useful constraint, but it also means their definition doesn't cover intentional creation of markets rather than discovery of existing ones, which is a significant blind spot in later literature that builds on their work. Bird took a completely different angle with her focus on entrepreneurial behavior as the central unit of analysis. She argued that definitions focusing on organizational outcomes were measuring the wrong thing. In practice, this matters when you're designing a study. If your dependent variable is whether a venture survives, you're using a Kazanjian-style frame. If your dependent variable is whether an individual displays certain cognitive patterns regardless of organizational outcome, you're using a Bird-style frame. Mixing these in the same analysis without acknowledging it will confuse your readers and probably your data too.

A Common Mistake and How I Fixed It

The most common error I see in papers using these definitions is treating them as interchangeable synonyms. A definition from Knight on uncertainty-bearing is fundamentally different from a definition from Schumpeter on creative destruction, even though both appear in every entrepreneurship textbook. Knight's entrepreneur is a decision-maker under genuine uncertainty. Schumpeter's entrepreneur is a breaker of equilibria. One is an economic actor in a static model. The other is a force of market transformation. I ran into this directly when building a conceptual model for a project on social entrepreneurship. I had drafted three paragraphs weaving together Schumpeter and Knight without noticing that their underlying assumptions about markets were incompatible. The fix was straightforward: I stopped trying to synthesize them into one definition and instead used each one for its appropriate layer. Schumpeter explained the disruptive mechanism. Knight explained the decision context. They sat side by side without requiring reconciliation. This approach took longer upfront because you have to read past the dictionary-level summaries most sources provide. But it saved me from having to rewrite the entire theoretical foundation section when a supervisor flagged the contradiction.

What the Definitions Leave Out

None of the classic definitions adequately account for platform-based or ecosystem entrepreneurship. The frameworks assume a relatively clear boundary between entrepreneur and organization, between opportunity and execution. When your "venture" exists across multiple platforms and its success depends on network effects rather than individual decision-making, Stevenson's "pursuit of opportunity beyond resources" still works but becomes almost trivially broad. You're spending more time justifying that your phenomenon counts as entrepreneurship at all than you are applying any specific definition. If you're working in that space, I'd recommend pairing any of the classic definitions with Anderson, Batchelor, and Gartner's more recent work on entrepreneurial events, which shifts the unit of analysis away from the entrepreneur and toward discrete actions. It won't solve every problem, but it gives you something more granular to hang your coding or analysis on. The definitions exist. They're just not as consistent as you need them to be when you're writing against them.