Who is an entrepreneur?

My favorite definition of an entrepreneur has been 'One who recognizes opportunities and organizes resources to take advantage of the opportunity'.  But I read a new one in a post a couple of days ago - actually, it was conceived 37 years ago by Harvard Business School professor Howard Stevenson - that puts the 'organizes resources' in a different light.   Stevenson's definition of entrepreneurship is 'the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.'


The 'without regard to resources' is an interesting differentiation.  This implies that, to an entrepreneur, the appeal of the opportunity is more important than the availability of the resources to execute on the opportunity.  At every step the entrepreneur looks at what should be done and then figures out how to do it - instead of the standard approach of looking at what can be done and how it should be made to fit.  The entrepreneurial approach starts with the results required instead of the resources available.  Looking back at some of the great entrepreneur stories (Steve Jobs for example) this seems to have definitely been the case.  The post also quotes Stevenson on how more entrepreneurs start out poor instead of rich as they are less constrained by lack of resources.  (Though that didn't apply to Bill Gates.)


I do like the definition though. You can see it in all the entrepreneurs who boot-strap their way to success.  It is what drives entrepreneurs to work with contractors to build prototypes if they don't have co-founders, and not be afraid to do marketing and sales even if their own background is in engineering.  They are not stuck in the comfort zone of requiring all the questions to be answered before going after the opportunity.   Maybe it's just another way of saying that an entrepreneur is - cheers, you guessed it! - a risk-taker.  You can read the Inc.com post here.