The importance of the ‘entrepreneur’ in early economic discourse

Remarkably, the word ‘entrepreneur’ was not part of the English language until it drifted from its French origins into various writings, treatises and letters within the English and American communities of economics scholars in the mid-1770s to 1870s. The word was entirely silent during the first century of the classical era until The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith in 1776 but has had considerable impact on economic concepts that have been formulated since. This silence suggests that the factors of production, namely, the inputs used to produce goods and services, were seen as limited to three important elements - land, labour and capital, which Mankiw (1997) eloquently describes in his Principles of Economics. The term ‘entrepreneur’ is also not included or mentioned in the first edition of Samuelson’s Economics published in 1948. While no doubt, both authors would have considered the importance of entrepreneurial activities, that role was simply not mentioned in the discourse on economic theory at the time. It was not until the 1930s that the word was used by Schumpeter (1934). Today it is in common usage and linked to the idea of innovation. Is it not curious, that the notion of an entrepreneur, the very factor that organizes a business and is responsible for its success or otherwise, lacks a common term in the English language to encapsulate this important risk-taking function in which an individual makes a living by making a profit through the running of a business? (Kates, 2015).

In conducting our own initial analysis, we look first at the occurrence of terms relating to ‘entrepreneur’ in a number of search engines [in March 2018], such as Google and Google Scholar. We then study the frequency of the term’s appearance in Google Books. The methodology used in this analysis of the role of entrepreneurs in Google Books is highly novel, we would argue, at least as applied to Economic Ideas. We look at how often key terms relating to entrepreneurs appear in books in English and are graphically depicted in Google Books regarding these terms being used over the last three centuries, which we discuss and present as comparative charts below. We also suggest that Google Books may achieve wider diffusion through translations into many languages but this is rarer for journal articles.

Google Search and Google Scholar

In Table 1.1, we set out the respective scores in Google Search and Google Scholar for the words entrepreneur, entrepreneurial and entrepreneurship. We can see these occur in English in very large numbers.

4 Introduction

Table 1.1 Google Search analysis of key terms, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial, number of entries [16 March 2018]

Table 1.2 Google Search analysis of key terms, entrepreneur, inventor and innovator, number of entries [16 March 2018]

Table 1.3 Google Search analysis of key terms, entrepreneur, international business and multinationals, number of entries [16 March 2018]

In Table 1.2, we set out the scores in Google Search and Google Scholar for the terms, entrepreneur, inventor and innovator, to show their relative numbers.

In Table 1.3, we look at the respective scores in Google Search and Google Scholar for the terms entrepreneur, international business and multinationals.