Entrepreneurship Through the Ages

This assignment delves into the historical evolution of entrepreneurship, examining its impact across three significant eras: the Agricultural Age, the Industrial Age, and the Information Age. It highlights key innovations like the plough, steam engine, and internet, and explores how each era shaped work environments, social structures, and economic landscapes. The assignment also introduces Kuratko's model of new venture development, emphasizing the importance of market analysis, technical feasibility, competition, and internal factors in assessing a venture's viability. Furthermore, it discusses the various risks entrepreneurs face, including financial, career, social, and psychic risks.

Running head: ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Entrepreneurship
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author note

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1. History of Entrepreneurship
Agricultural Age is referred as the time between the 18th century and the last of 19th century
in which many improvements were noticed in agricultural production and technology. Some
inventions of this age contain of the plough and the wheel, which later on went on to improve the
lives of people via effective farming and also food surpluses. Due to that, towns developed and
expanded, and the contemporary trade and commerce centers started to spring up in certain
regions (Landes, Mokyr & Baumol, 2012).
At the time of Industrial Age, energy sources and power driven machinery were introduced.
Growth and expansion became swifter, in which the work environment changed from being
individual to being group based in a more centralized setting. Factories mass produced products.
Some of the most famous inventions of this age includes textile mills, large scale production
equipment and the steam engine. People started becoming more interested in working in cities,
which ultimately led to the overcrowding of those cities. One more situation that came up was
the improved control over the resources by the rich people, and this further widened the
inequality between them and the poor people.
The Information Age was also known as the Computer Age or the Digital Age. The age
came into being with the advent of the internet and after that the personal computers. The
technological changes of this age comprise of the World Wide Web, which started off with
military applications and then moving in to business applications and then to individual use, the
internet, microprocessors and fiber optics. Information digitalization had huge influence on
several industries like entertainment, education, publishing and retailing. Consequent to this
development emerged a new paradigm generated by virtual technology emerged, high speed
internet and other different technologies. According to argument, this new paradigm gave rise to

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a new form of global culture and economy that came to be called as the imagination age.
Creativity and innovation finds a key component in imagination, while everyone is required to
have the basic skills of creativity and problem solving, irrespective of any everyday situation at
home or at the work place (Baum, Frese & Baron, 2014).
2. Kuratko’s Model Of New Venture
Kuratko in his model of new venture puts importance on the market and technical aspects,
even competition for complementing the questions on the basis of internal factors like financial
and organizational elements. He suggested the following model for showing the major five
elements for addressing while deciding the viability of a new venture (Kuratko, 2016).
Fig 1. Key elements for considering while conducting feasibility analysis of new
ventures
Source: (Kuratko, 2016)
Together with other contemporaries, Kuratko also proposed a research model for helping
entrepreneurial motivation. His models help manage the dark side of entrepreneurship, like
financial risks, which arises with variations in entrepreneurs’ desire for wealth, career risk that
results in loss of job security, social risk that comes up with competition between commitment of

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work and family, and psychic risk that influences failure on the welfare of entrepreneurs
(Kuratko, Hornsby & Covin, 2014).

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References
Baum, J. R., Frese, M., & Baron, R. A. (Eds.). (2014). The psychology of entrepreneurship.
Psychology Press.
Kuratko, D. F. (2016). Entrepreneurship: Theory, process, and practice. Cengage Learning.
Kuratko, D. F., Hornsby, J. S., & Covin, J. G. (2014). Diagnosing a firm's internal environment
for corporate entrepreneurship. Business Horizons, 57(1), 37-47.
Landes, D. S., Mokyr, J., & Baumol, W. J. (Eds.). (2012). The invention of enterprise:
Entrepreneurship from ancient Mesopotamia to modern times. Princeton University
Press.