The Baton of Entrepreneurship: CBS Views on Entrepreneurship

There are many thoughts and beliefs about entrepreneurship. This diversity in opinions and concepts may be triggered by the booming interest in entrepreneurship and in entrepreneurs. Journalists, politicians and academics, just to mention a few groups, have greatly turned their focus and attention towards entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. And in the labour market, entrepreneurship has become one of the more attractive options. Entrepreneurship has indeed become a centre of attention throughout society. There are numerous definitions, terms, theories, thoughts, and conjectures on and around entrepreneurship. It is truly a multidisciplinary topic that draws on sociology, economics, management, and psychology, etc. It can therefore often be confusing to study, and exceedingly difficult to gather a coherent set of academic contributions on entrepreneurship. Very different things are investigated under the heading of entrepreneurship. Even when scholars discuss overlapping issues, the used terminology may often be misaligned. Indeed, even the most accomplished experts tend to be confused when debating topics on entrepreneurship. There can easily emerge a misperception and misunderstandings due to the muddy and inconsistent use of terms. Motivated by the need for understanding the differences in the way we perceive and think about entrepreneurship, the CBS Entrepreneurship BiS Platform set out to ask 10 scholars from CBS to offer their thoughts on 5 dimensions with regard to entrepreneurship. In what could best be described as a curiosity-driven relay, these scholars passed the baton over to the next person, resulting in a ‘run’ across departments and varying traditions of thought. They represented the Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics, the Department of Economics, the Department of Strategic Management and Globalization, the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy, the Department of Business and Politics, and the Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship. The five question posed to the interviewees where: 1. What is your understanding of entrepreneurship? 2. What characterizes and entrepreneur as an individual? 3. What does this mean for university education, or education more generally? 4. What is the role and function of entrepreneurship for private companies and the public sector? 5. In what sense is entrepreneurship important for society? The aim of the Baton of Entrepreneurship is to stimulate dialogue and share insights into entrepreneurship research across the internal boundaries of CBS. But the Baton of Entrepreneurship also functions as a means to convey differences and inform about how entrepreneurship can be thought of in different ways. Having said this, it also reveals that the differences across CBS might not be as big as one might expect and that there are profound overlaps representing a potential for cross-organizational interaction on the topic of entrepreneurship. Perhaps this commonality will be the fuel, which allow new discoveries in the field of entrepreneurship to flourish.