To define is to confine—and like the heffalump, the entrepreneur isn’t easy to encage or identify

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories.Many years ago, in 1971, Peter Kilby wrote that understanding entrepreneurship is like hunting a ‘heffalump,’ a fictional elephant-like creature from Winnie-the-Pooh.Many claim to have captured it, but their descriptions do not match and no two agree on what it looks like. After centuries of research, we are still arguing about what an entrepreneur really is.

Is an entrepreneur a risk taker, an innovator, a manager, a social outsider or just someone who got lucky?If you look around India today, you will see this confusion in everyday language. A vegetable vendor who adopts UPI, a startup founder in Bengaluru, a second-generation owner of a family business and a social entrepreneur in a village are all called ‘entrepreneurs,’ but we rarely mean the same thing in each case.

The word ‘entrepreneur’ entered economic writing more than 200 years ago. In the 18th century, Richard Cantillon described the entrepreneur as an uncertainty bearer.

In the 19th century, during the Industrial Revolution, Jean-Baptiste Say saw the entrepreneur as someone above the capitalist, who moves resources from lower to higher productivity.The 20th century changed the picture again. Frank Knight drew a line between risk and uncertainty and argued that entrepreneurs make decisions when the future cannot be calculated.

Joseph Schumpeter then turned the entrepreneur into a central figure of ‘creative destruction,’ the innovator who reshapes markets. Israel Kirzner focused on the entrepreneur’s alertness to price gaps and market imperfections.More recently, Peter Drucker argued that entrepreneurship is a discipline that can be learnt, “a purposeful and organized search for a change.” Howard Stevenson, whose definition