The relationship between innovation and entrepreneurship : easy definition , hard policy

The paper argues that innovation is the combination of an inventive process and an entrepreneurial process to create new economic value for defined stakeholders and focuses on the policy implications of this duality. Attention is concentrated on summarising the entrepreneurial process and its importance to innovation policy and avoids any detailed elaboration of the invention process. A very brief overview of the invention process is followed by a moderately detailed summary of Hindle’s (2008) model of entrepreneurial process. With an understanding and formal articulation of entrepreneurial process it becomes possible to focus on the key issues that ought to inform the development of innovation policy. These key issues are discussed and the paper concludes where it began by emphasising the need to build innovation policy on the explicit recognition that innovation results from the blending of two processes, invention and entrepreneurship, and that viable innovation policy can never be created unless entrepreneurial process is properly understood and addressed.