1. Entrepreneurship as a Social and Economic Process

This chapter examines the social and economic process underpinning entrepreneurship activity and the impacts of entrepreneurial activity on global, national and local economies. In particular, it focuses on defining key concepts such as enterprise, entrepreneurship, entrepreneurs and innovation. Entrepreneurship and innovation are now recognised as being among the key elements in the process of economic development and vital to the ability of a nation’s economy to maintain competitiveness. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) entrepreneurship and innovation are the essential tools for dealing with many of the world’s social and economic challenges.Government interest in entrepreneurship and innovation is driven by the desire to maintain economic growth and the creation of jobs. The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2007–2009, like the Great Depression of 1929–1939, impacted most of the world’s economies, triggering negative GDP growth, high rates of unemployment, the collapse of companies and the failure of banks (OEDC 2016). However, even without these traumatic economic crises, the overall trend in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been a steady decline in full-time employment within large organisations, and their replacement with new jobs created by self-employment and small, high-growth gazelle firms (Brännback et al. 2014).