Entrepreneurship in the Business Curriculum

Though the word entrepreneurship is appearing with increasing frequency in popular books, academic texts, and scholarly journals, an alarming number of these uses seem to miss the essence of the entrepreneurial phenomenon. Rather than being used synonymously with concepts such as charismatic leadership or small business, entrepreneurship should be approached as the shifting of resources from areas of low to areas of higher productivity. This article suggests three areas—the role, function, and historical perspective—in which the phenomenon of entrepreneurship is misunderstood. The value of studying entrepreneurship in the framework of these three factors is also discussed. This framework provides instructors of courses on entrepreneurship with an approach to curriculum development that attempts to capture the essence of the classical economic phenomenon known as entrepreneurship.