"Who Is an Entrepreneur?" Is it Still the wrong question?

Abstract

William Gartner's 1988 article 'Who is an Entrepreneur?' Is the Wrong Question suggested that more productive research into entrepreneurship could result from shifting the unit of analysis from the individual level to the functional level. Eighteen years later, it does not appear that the research resulting from this shift has produced agreement on the most appropriate definition of entrepreneurship. This paper compares three definitions of entrepreneurship currently being discussed by scholars and offers a fourth definition, which brings the unit of analysis back to the level of the individual. The paper reviews the literature defining the domain of entrepreneurship including the proposed new definition, develops a number of scenarios, tests each scenario against competing domain statements and concludes that the time has come to re-visit the individual as entrepreneur.