Entrepreneurship has been an important part of the Econ 101 playbook at least since economist Joseph Schumpeter’s landmark work, written in the middle of the twentieth century, on the nature of capitalism and innovation. Schumpeter put forward our favorite definition of innovation—“the market introduction of a technical or organisational novelty, not just its invention”—and, like us, believed that it was an essentially recombinant process, “the carrying out of new combinations.”
