Teaching Entrepreneurship And Micro-Entrepreneurship: An International Perspective

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is an integral part of business education. However, the concept is often confused or used synonymously with capitalism, perhaps because entrepreneurship is one of the four factors of production and profit maximization is considered as the single most important topic in teaching theory of the firm. Using risk as the key variable in separating the domains of a capitalist and an entrepreneur, Schumpeter used innovation as the main function of an entrepreneur. The popularity of micro-credit in the 1980s extended Schumpeter’s work to micro-entrepreneurship, popularly dubbed as “entrepreneurship with less”. This paper traces the origin of the concept of entrepreneurship knowledge and extends it to micro-entrepreneurship with a goal of enhancing an understanding of the concept in the sphere of international business education.