Entrepreneurship and the innovative self: a Schumpeterian reflection

This paper draws upon the Schumpeterian statement that effective change only comes from within. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this notion can be applied to personal life and practices displayed by certain individuals wishing to innovate themselves by recombining given personal resources with the purpose of establishing a new person enterprise.

The approach used in this article is to conceptually propose and argue a reading of entrepreneurship as the agency of an innovative subject, embedded in a Foucauldian technology of the self based on self‐care and self‐knowledge.

The analysis leads to the finding that the individual who challenges (or resists) destiny, or a given personal order, and manages to establish a new personal order, is entrepreneurial in so far as s/he changes the way of doing things, or a static way of living.

The paper suggests theoretical implications for further research. The use of Schumpeter to analyse personal practices as a form of entrepreneurship reinforces the notion of entrepreneurship beyond the business context and opens up research possibilities in a variety of fields and ways, for example, research capable of linking ethics and entrepreneurship, self‐reflexivity and entrepreneurship, and subjectivity and entrepreneurship.

The article is original in that it bids to extend the theory of entrepreneurship to perspectives that are clearly embedded in personal life for the sake of self‐development. Its value is that it allows for a transcending of both the economic and social notions of entrepreneurship, enabling us to outline a third dimension to the literature, which we call a person enterprise.