Blackwell Reference Online

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Entrepreneurship is concerned with understanding how, in the absence of current markets for future goods and services, these goods and services are brought into existence by individuals and groups ( Venkataraman, 1997 ). To the extent value is embodied in products and services, entrepreneurship is concerned with how the opportunity to create “value” in society is discovered or imagined and acted upon by some people. Often new products and services are brought to market by new firms. Therefore, entrepreneurship is also concerned with how people create new firms, nurture them, and renew older firms over time. The field of business ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with the fairness of methods used to create this “value,” and the ensuing distribution of the value among various stakeholders to the enterprise. Thus, if we understand entrepreneurship and ethics as the fields that together seek to describe, explain, predict, and prescribe how value is discovered, created, distributed, and perhaps destroyed, then together they represent two sides of the same coin: the coin of value creation and sharing. Entrepreneurs, through their imagination, energy, talent, knowledge, contacts, and activities, attempt to create new wealth in societies. They do this in two ways: by reducing or eliminating existing inefficiencies in markets and firms or by bringing new products and problem solutions ... log in or subscribe to read full text