What Type Of Entrepreneur Are You?

This is one of those “heard it from a friend of a friend” kind of things and I thought visitors to A@W would find it interesting. It addresses the recurring question I get asked about whether or not there is a difference between a small business owner and an entrepreneur? To be quite honest, up until this point, I have been fairly casual about using the ‘titles’ interchangeably, falling back on the dictionary definition of entrepreneur which is: “a person who organizes and manages a business undertaking, assuming the risk for the sake of the profit.” So yes, small business owners are entrepreneurs.

However, after reading Vivek Wadhwa’s guest blog post on LocalTechWire, I may start breaking it down a bit further. Vivek sites input from the Kauffman Foundation, which makes the following distinction:

“Replicative entrepreneurs”, who constitute the vast majority of small businesses, and “innovative entrepreneurs,” the rare few who bring new products/services to market or who pioneer new production methods. “ It’s a good read, check it out here: Defining who is real entrepreneur – It’s not black and white

Vivek Wadhwa is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.