Actions, actors, strategies and growth trajectories in international entrepreneurship

For detailed description and developments in modern entrepreneurial orientation, see Etemad 2015a, b, c.

There are documented historical information in religious studies about the travelling caravans and the fort-like out-post called “Caravan-Saras” (Home for Caravans in Persian) with multiple purposes. They provided accommodation for occasional travellers and mainly for the religious missionaries, who recorded various occurrences in their travel summaries and reported on their missions at their destinations. For the international trading caravans, Caravan-Saras provided safe stop-overs, warehousing and travel provisions, including replacements for horses and mules as well as basic supplies and repairs.

The study of entrepreneurship reaches back to the work in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries of Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon, which was foundational to classical economics. Cantillon defined the term first in his Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, or Essay on the Nature of Trade in General; it referred to a person who would pay a certain price for a product to resells it at an uncertain price, “making decisions about obtaining and using the resources while consequently admitting the risk of enterprise” (Cantillon 1755). Cantillon emphasized the willingness of the entrepreneur to assume the risk and to deal with uncertainty. Reportedly, Jean-Baptiste Say (1998) has also identified entrepreneurs as the driver for economic development, emphasizing their role in collecting input factors for production by diverting resources from less to more productive activities and fields.

Rubina Romanello: rubina.romanello@uniud.it

Maria Chiarvesio: maria.chiarvesio@uniud.it