A new perspective to understand entrepreneurship 71
completed) to rate from 1 (not important) to 4 (very important), the eight themes derived from the factorial analysis. The typological study thus performed revealed two groups, the second group focusing on the outcome. Does it mean that the members in this group reject the subject, the entrepreneur, as not relevant to the domain? Results show that this is not the case, as the average for the second group is 2.43, whereas the average for the first group (focused on the individual) is 3.15.
In our approach, the outcome (a new venture creation, for instance) and the subject (the entrepreneur) are inseparable. This has brought us to define the object studied in the field of entrepreneurship as an individual/value creation dialogic.
The dialogic thus defined is not hermetic. In the field of entrepreneurship, it is assumed that the entrepreneur is a necessary condition for the emergence of the outcome. The entrepreneur is not the only necessary condition, however, as the environment, for example, must also tolerate the entrepreneur’s activity. Similarly, the outcome is a necessary
condition for the entrepreneur to exist and be recognised as such, but it is not sufficient either. New companies (in the legal sense of the word) are sometimes created as subsidiaries of existing organisations, without it being possible to credit a specific individual for the creation of such structures. Differences in point of view may bring researchers to favour one of these two aspects in their approach to entrepreneurship. Nevertheless all the research issues relating to the field should include both dimensions.
Definition of the dialogic
To take our demonstration one step further, we must now make it more operational. The individual/value creation dialogic may be defined as follows (Bruyat 1993: 58):
Individuals are necessary conditions to the creation of value, they determine its production modalities, its amplitude . . . Individuals are the main actors of value creation. The shape that value creation takes, a company for instance, is the individual’s ‘thing’, so we have:
individual value creation
that Gartner’s aim was to determine a definition of the domain on which specialists could agree. Using the DELPHI method, on the other hand, could have led to a conjunctive logic.