Entrepreneurship as a Value for Innovation and Knowledge Creation

Abstract: Since antiquity, humanity has evolved thanks mainly to the substitution of work for tools. Changes entail crises and do not occur in an orderly and synchronized way. Joseph Schumpeter called this as the Cycle of Creative Destruction, in which “economic structure is unceasingly transformed from the inside out, incessantly destroying the former and incessantly creating a new one” as he says in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (1961). Schumpeter's ideas on capitalism, entrepreneurship and innovation continue to resonate with students, businessmen and women. This Schumpeter’ view is now corroborated by Nonaka and Takeuchi (1997), when they qualify an organizational leader as someone that can create knowledge as “an internal entrepreneur with a strong adventurous spirit”. Organizational knowledge, once entangled in Research and Development (R&D) platforms, emerges fully empowered in new business models, products and service development, entering with all the glory in the “knowledge society”, not as a mere resource alongside the factors of production – land, capital and labour – but rather as the main resource, as Nonaka and Takeuchi (1997) point out. In the opinion of the Committee of the Regions – “Entrepreneurship 2020” Action Plan, published in the Official Journal of the European Union on 5 December 2013, in its recommendation “Promoting education and training in entrepreneurship” 60 stresses that “Europe must present entrepreneurship to young people as a promising and professional choice, reviving entrepreneurship” (PTC 356/72 Official Journal of the European Union 5/12/2013). Therefore, the objective of this study is based on the importance and role of the entrepreneur in the process of innovation and creation of organizational knowledge, as a factor promoting the economic and social development of a region. 

Key words: entrepreneurship; innovation; knowledge

        JEL codes: M2