Entrepreneurship Development Theories: Understanding The Background (+Examples)

I have talked about some of the facts that you need to know about entrepreneurship development theories in organisations. In this article, I want to look at some of the Entrepreneurship Development Theories for entrepreneurs.

Follow me as we are going to look at this together in this article. 

The word entrepreneurship originates from the French word ‘entrepredres’. It means to undertake, that is, to undertake a business venture.

It also means ‘go between’ that is a person who signed a contract with a financier to sell his or her product. 

The capitalist provided a loan to the merchant adventurer at a given rate of interest.

The merchant adventurer performed an active role of trading bearing the physical and emotional risk; the financier bears the passive risk and usually take a large part of the profit. 

This was the earlier view of the entrepreneur prior to the middle age in Europe.

An example of such an entrepreneur was the legendary adventurer Marco Polo.

In the middle age, merchants, actors artists, painters, sculptors, architects or managers of large scale art projects were referred to as entrepreneurs. 

Theories and commentaries on entrepreneurship originate from the following source of approaches:

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#1 Psychological Trait Approach

The contributors to this approach are McClelland, Meredith, etc. They contended that the entrepreneur has some personality characteristics e.g need for achievement and independence, risk-taking, internal locus of control, foresight, tolerance for ambiguity, acceptance of failure among others that distinguish him or her from other individuals. 

#2 Sociological Approach

The contributions of writers such as Marx Weber and Frank Young argued that prevailing social and economic conditions in the social environment have impacts on the development of entrepreneur behaviour. 

There are other African commentators that believe that entrepreneurship is a product of the social-economic and technological system. 

Once these systems are weak in a nation or state, entrepreneur behaviour is retarded. For instance, Ogbor Ikhimokpa and Enwegbara believe that the banes of African entrepreneurship are bad governance, corruption, poor infrastructure, weak economic base among others. 

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