La Relacion Entre La Innovacion Y El Emprendizaje

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Maite Aldamiz-Echebarria
ERASMUS STUDENT

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN INNOVATION AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP
It is well known that innovation plays an important role in the business world. Nowadays innovation is a very popular word and it is constantly appearing in the media. Just as time goes by the relationship between innovation andentrepreneurship has radically changed.
Richard Cantillon as far as it is known was the first man using the term entrepreneur in an economic context in one of his published essays. He referred to an entrepreneur as a person who just pretends to make profits by selling at a higher price than the purchase one under risk conditions. Here the entrepreneur definition does not necessarily involve theinnovative attribute. Years later Jean Baptise Say, a populariser of the words of Adams Smith was much more explicit than Cantillon. Cantillon (1680) emphasizes that an entrepreneur “must possess the art of superintendence and administration” with all that it implies as for example solving problems abilities, the assumption of multiples roles.., but one essential aspect was still missing; theentrepreneurial creativity.
It is with Joseph Schumpeter (1883) when it is first mentioned “whatever the type, everyone is an entrepreneur only when he carries out new combinations, and loses the character as soon as he has built up his business”. Schumpeter’s theory was focused on entrepreneurs as the responsible for the innovation and technological change of a nation. Schumpeter also highlights therole of the entrepreneurs as those who will mostly determine a country’s economic growth. Here we have the relationship between entrepreneurship, innovation and economic development.
This vision of the entrepreneur as a creator of culture, especially material, or economic development, could be conceived as a return to the spirit of the Spanish early man, when it refers to those who created the firstbasic and physical elements, from cathedrals and palaces to machines and systems of organization, of the Modern Age. Somebody, in this spirit, consider the entrepreneur as a cultural hero. This view is necessary to understand the impact of entrepreneurship in our actual society in spite of the fact that the reality is not such radical. Obviously the economic growth is supposed to depend on manyother factors like macro-environment, economic policies, levels of employment, quality of education...but there is strong evidence that the more innovative a company or a country is, the better for itself.
This has been a brief review of the history where we clearly have seen how the concept of innovation has been integrating within years with the entrepreneur’s definition. In this way, theentrepreneur stops being principally a risk taker in order to become an innovator. But not everything is as easy as it seems and this is where an important debate comes into place. Although innovation is slowly becoming a more important issue being nowadays almost a basic ingredient for any business that pretends survive, there are different views about whether the contrary of what Scumpeter says theentrepreneurship necessarily has to be related or not with innovation.
Kirzner (1973) for example, an actual economist says that anyone can be an entrepreneur and defines an entrepreneur as someone who notices some of these opportunities for profitable trade and takes them. This view is completely different from the previous one and it disregard for the concept of innovation. Thus, entrepreneurword does strictly take implicit the concept of innovation?, Or in other words every entrepreneur is an innovator? Throughout this essay we will make contemplation on this important and profound issue.
What do we understand by innovation? This is a broad and subjective concept. Many people confuse it with invention. An invention is something new or just a significant improvement in something...