Entrepreneurs “from within”? Schumpeter and the challenge of endogenizing novelty

Remy Guichardaz and Julien Pénin ()

Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg

Abstract: The development of a dynamic model of endogenous economic change was a major challenge for Schumpeter throughout his academic career. With regard to this life-long objective, this work provides an explanation of why it was impossible for Schumpeter to offer a convincing endogenous theory of the emergence of novelty. We show that Schumpeter’s view of the apparition of pure novelty is centered around an individual and elitist dimension of entrepreneurship and an energetic and vitalist axiom of social change, which is by nature hardly compatible with endogenous evolution. Furthermore, our revisiting of the last writings of Schumpeter shows that, when it comes to the issue of the emergence of pure novelty, the impossibility persisted until his death. Contrary to the claim of some commentators, even the old Schumpeter remained stuck into an individualistic, elitist and energetic view of the generation of pure novelty.

Keywords: Schumpeter; entrepreneur; economic evolution; endogenous change; innovation. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B15 O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent, nep-gro, nep-his, nep-hme, nep-hpe and nep-pke
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://beta.u-strasbg.fr/WP/2021/2021-41.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2021-41

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers of BETA from Bureau d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, UDS, Strasbourg Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).