Week 2- Reading Reflection

1) Reading chapter one of the textbook gave me insight into a general idea of what information we are going to learn about this semester. The biggest surprise for me in the reading were the identifications of the different kinds of entrepreneurs.  I had always thought that it was pretty widely accepted as far as what the definition of an “entrepreneur” was. An entrepreneur is someone who invented something or created their own business. In reality, they are so much more. An entrepreneur is someone who has had an idea of how to improve the world, and they acted on that idea. That act can be creating a new business, making a new innovation, or even creating a new group inside an already established business. There are all kinds of entrepreneurs.

2) The one part of the reading that confused me was the “Schools-of-Thought Approaches to Entrepreneurship”.  To me, it seems like all of these ideas as to how these people became entrepreneurs could apply. For example, in the “macro view” section there are 3 schools of thought. 1) The environment is a major part in entrepreneurial success. 2) The financial external factors are what motivate entrepreneurs to do what they do. And 3) a person feels out of place in society so they go do their own thing and become an entrepreneur. It seems to me that all of these schools of thoughts could be integrated and describe one person, or not describe another person at all; why do they have to have different labels besides “entrepreneur”?

3) Two questions I would ask the author are as follows:

1)      What made you decide to write a book on entrepreneurship?

2)      Who established all of these schools-of-thoughts and approaches to entrepreneurship?

I would ask these questions because I am curious what kind of person decides there should be a textbook on a rather abstract subject, and I’m also curious as to where the information came from on this abstract subject.  Entrepreneurship is not a commonly studied phenomena, so I’m curious how one becomes interested in the subject.

4) One thing I thought the author was wrong about were the labels for different types of entrepreneurs. As I said in question 2 of this assignment, I think some of the labels and descriptions of these entrepreneurs should be integrated, or at least not as definitive. I believe that any kind of person can become an entrepreneur, so why should there be any sort of descriptions at all? You will never cover every entrepreneur out there, so why don’t just leave the descriptions open-ended? But then again, if everything was left open-ended, we would not have a textbook for this class today.