Seriously, you raise a good point. What I mean is that entrepreneurship in the Schumpeterian, Knightian, or Kirznerian senses (what I call “functional,” versus “occupational” or “structural” concepts) manifests itself in many ways, not only the establishment of new ventures. As we interpret Knight, judgment is a ubiquitous activity that is tied to resource ownership, such that owners of existing enterprises exercise judgment as much as those who establish new ventures.

But I agree that creativity and innovation can be conceived in a narrow sense, as activities that business owners or founders do sometimes, but not all the time. (Alertness, as I read Kirzner, is more of an every day phenomenon, like Knightian judgment.)

Nicolai also distinguish (perhaps not consistently or clearly enough) between a general, loose sense of judgment that all people who owns resources (including their human capital) do daily, and a more specific sense that applies to “business people.”

BTW, everybody, I meant to link to an earlier post by Brian on this topic:

http://managementrandd.blogspot.com/2008/01/reality-of-entrepreneurship.html

I tend to think of it in the exact opposite way. How much business behavior is really creative or innovative? If we adopt a Schumpeterian definition of entrepreneurship, I’m not confident that much business activity would qualify. In contrast, using a startup definition allows to examine quite a lbit more activity.

To the extent that I am familiar with it, I agree that your judgment-related definition is broader than an innovation-dependent view. But when judgment is defined as “decision-making when the range of possible future outcomes, let alone the likelihood of individual outcomes, is unknown,” it’s not entirely clear to me how this is differentiated from “business.” I suppose I need to read those Klein-Foss papers more closely.

And by the way, I strongly recommend Shane’s book, even to those who are specialists in the field.