Le travail entrepreneurial, ou l'entrepreneur schumpetérien performé

Creating a firm requires the completion of specific tasks of gathering, and combining of the resources needed for production and sales. The head of the project does not do all this alone; he receives help from advisers, experts and managerial tools. This study of the collective entrepreneurial work accomplished by jobless persons who set up a business casts doubt on the Schumpeterian assumption of a visionary entrepreneur, who, all alone, creatively designs a “new combination” of resources. Although a new firm does not spontaneously spring out of an individual's intuition, the framework wherein it gradually takes shape tends to make it a novel combination that is coherent in terms of production, sales and accounting. In this framework, full responsibility can be attributed to the project head. The entrepreneur is not, therefore, Schumpeterian; he becomes so.