Entrepreneurship involves taking risks to pursue opportunities in the market to gain profits. It requires being alert to potential profit opportunities and resources, and seeing projects through to completion. Entrepreneurs play an important role by introducing new goods and services for consumers, and helping drive material progress by understanding gaps between current and potential offerings. While risky, entrepreneurship is a creative process akin to art that combines resources in new ways for uncertain rewards. However, textbooks often overlook the role of entrepreneurs in favor of depicting perfect competition without human actors taking initiative. This fails to acknowledge the real traits like alertness and enthusiasm that entrepreneurs provide and are difficult to capture mathematically.

1. Section 2 from the:
The Concise Guide To Economics
by Jim Cox

2. Entreprenuership.
Entrepreneurship is risking valuable resources. What is done and what could be done?
2. Entrepreneurship
Acting on perceived opportunities in the market in an
attempt to gain profits.
This acting involves being alert to profit resources and
seeing a project through to completion.
Entrepreneurs can be regarded as heroic characters in the
new goods and services
to the consumer. To quote from Ludwig vonMises in
Human Action : They are the leaders
on the way to material progress. They are the first to understand that there is a discrepancy
between what is done and what could be done. They guess what the consumers would like
to have and are intent on providing them with these things. p. 336

3. Entrepremnuership.
Entrepreneurship is an art, every bit as much as creating a painting or
sculpture. In each case--running a business and producing a work of art--the
same elements abound: Conceiving the undertaking, taking resources and
combining them into something new and different, risking those valuable
resources in producing something which may ultimately prove to be of less
value.
It is very common in economics textbooks to ignore the entrepreneur when
the texts discuss markets and competition. Their treatment implies that this
alertness to profit possibilities, arrangement of financing, management of
resources and seeing a project through to completion are all automatic
within the market economy. They are not. Real flesh and blood people must
act (and not once, but continuously), and be motivated to take these risks in
order for commerce to proceed.

4. The theory of perfect competition entirely eliminates any role for such a person. One
of the reasons the role of entrepreneurs has been deemphasized is the methodology
of positivism. This approach reduces economic phenomena to mathematics and
graphs. Since the traits of alertness, energy, and enthusiasm so necessary for
entrepreneurship do not lend themselves readily to mathematics and graphing they
are neglected by many economists. Here we have a method displacing real-world
events. Which is it we should do?: Throw out parts of reality (such as the above
named traits) which do not fit with a method, or find a method that acknowledges
and deals with such significant parts of reality?
Dolan, Edwin G. and David E. Lindsay
Economics, 6th edition
(Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden Press, 1991)
pp. 788 - 811
f
lsom, Burt
Entrepreneurs vs. the State
,(Reston, Virginia: Young America's Foundation, 1987)
The Concise Guide To Economics
© 1995, 1997 Jim Cox

5. "Sample quote will go here.
It could be something finance
related or inspirational."
John Q. Speaker