A new perspective to understand entrepreneurship 79
we have previously demonstrated, there is no such thing as a born entrepreneur, one becomes an entrepreneur in a specific situation, and one does not remain an entrepreneur for one’s whole life. This type of situation may last for three days, three months or three years, but it has a beginning and an end. The concept of entrepreneurial situation helps define and date the phenomenon.
In an entrepreneurial situation, the individual’s main behaviours are related to taking initiatives, the changes faced, desired or initiated, the evaluation and acceptance of the risks and their implications. The entrepreneurial situation will also call upon the individual’s capacity to identify, appropriate and implement the resources necessary for the realisation of the project, the emergence of the organisation and its day-to-day running.
In an entrepreneurial situation, value creation may take the shape of a company or activity start-up project, the development of a product or innovation, or a company or activity takeover. Another important aspect of the entrepreneurial situation is the project’s organisational, social, cultural and economic environment, which is more or less favourable. Two key characteristics of the entrepreneurial situation are, on the one hand, the uncertainty (linked to the intensity of change for the individual and the environment) and on the other hand, the importance of individual and/or collective stakes, which generally raise the awareness of the risks incurred.
Time plays a key role in the entrepreneurial situation, as a factor of evolution and transformation of the project and/or the organisation. A situation can be entrepreneurial at a point in time and may not remain so for very long. Some individual behaviours may weaken, lose intensity and even disappear to leave room for other behaviours, less compatible with the value creation process. It is difficult for individuals and organisations to be constantly subjected to change. Contexts evolve as well as people’s perceptions of them. In the perspective we have chosen, for instance, not every business start-up project corresponds to an entrepreneurial situation. For a situation to qualify as entrepreneurial, several conditions must be met: the decision to act must have been made, and a certain degree of irreversibility in the process must be reached, notably at the level of personal commitment, with all the implications in terms of time and money consumption. Similarly, not all organisations resulting from a business start-up project can