Plants are mainly multicellular, predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae.

The term is today generally limited to the green plants, which form an
unranked clade Viridiplantae (Latin for "green plants"). This includes the flowering
plants, conifers and other gymnosperms, ferns, clubmosses, hornworts, liverworts, mosses and
the green algae, and excludes the red and brown algae. Historically, plants formed one of two
kingdoms covering all living things that were not animals, and both algae and fungi were treated as
plants; however all current definitions of "plant" exclude the fungi and some algae, as well as
the prokaryotes (the archaea and bacteria).

Green plants have cell walls containing cellulose and obtain most of their energy
from sunlight via photosynthesis by primary chloroplasts, derived
from endosymbiosis with cyanobacteria. Their chloroplasts contain chlorophylls a and b, which gives
them their green color. Some plants are parasitic and have lost the ability to produce normal
amounts of chlorophyll or to photosynthesize. Plants are characterized by sexual
reproduction and alternation of generations, although asexual reproduction is also common.

There are about 300315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260290
thousand, are seed plants (see the table below).[5] Green plants provide most of the world's
molecular oxygen[6] and are the basis of most of Earth's ecologies, especially on land. Plants that
produce grains, fruits and vegetables form humankind's basic foodstuffs, and have
been domesticated for millennia. Plants play many roles in culture. They are used as ornaments and,
until recently and in great variety, they have served as the source of most medicines and drugs. The
scientific study of plants is known as botany, a branch of biology.

Contents

Definition

Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things were traditionally divided; the other is
animals. The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle (384 BC 322 BC), who distinguished
between plants, which generally do not move, and animals, which often are mobile to catch their
food. Much later, when Linnaeus (17071778) created the basis of the modern system of scientific
classification, these two groups became the kingdoms Vegetabilia (later Metaphyta or Plantae)
and Animalia (also called Metazoa). Since then, it has become clear that the plant kingdom as
originally defined included several unrelated groups, and the fungi and several groups of algae were
removed to new kingdoms. However, these organisms are still often considered plants, particularly in
popular contexts.

Outside of formal scientific contexts, the term "plant" implies an association with certain traits, such
as being multicellular, possessing cellulose, and having the ability to carry out photosynthesis. [7][8]

Current definitions of Plantae

When the name Plantae or plant is applied to a specific group of organisms or taxon, it usually refers
to one of four concepts. From least to most inclusive, these four groupings are:

Name(s) Scope Description

 Land plants, also known as Embryophyta Plantae sens Plants in the strictest
u strictissimo sense include
the liverworts, hornworts, mosse
s, and vascular plants, as well as
fossil plants similar to these
surviving groups (e.g.,
Metaphyta Whittaker, 1969,
[9]
Plantae Margulis, 1971[10]).

Green plants, also known Plantae sens Plants in a strict sense include
as Viridiplantae, Viridiphyta or Chlorobiont u stricto the green algae, and land plants
a that emerged within them,
including stoneworts. The names
given to these groups vary
considerably as of July 2011.
Viridiplantae encompass a group
of organisms that
have cellulose in their cell walls,
possess chlorophylls a and b an
d have plastids that are bound by
only two membranes that are
capable of storing starch. It is
this clade that is mainly

Entrepreneurship
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrepreneurship
"Co-founder" redirects here. For someone who cultivates a startup, see Startup company Co-
founders.

Finnish entrepreneur Armi Ratia (19121979), founder of the Marimekko textile and home decorating company.
Entrepreneurship has traditionally been defined as the process of designing, launching and running
a new business, which typically begins as a small business, such as a startup company, offering a
product, process or service for sale or hire. The people who create these businesses are called
'entrepreneurs'.[2][3] It has been defined as the "...capacity and willingness to develop, organize, and
manage a business venture along with any of its risks in order to make a profit".[4] While definitions of
entrepreneurship typically focus on the launching and running of businesses, due to the
high risks involved in launching a start-up, a significant proportion of businesses have to close, due
to "...lack of funding, bad business decisions, an economic crisis or a combination of all of
these"[5] or due to lack of market demand. In the 2000s, the definition of "entrepreneurship"
expanded to explain how and why some individuals (or teams) identify opportunities, evaluate them
as viable, and then decide to exploit them, whereas others do not, [6] and, in turn, how entrepreneurs
use these opportunities to develop new products or services, launch new firms or even new
industries and create wealth.[7] Recent advances stress the fundamentally uncertain nature of the
entrepreneurial process, because although opportunities exist their existence cannot be discovered
or identified prior to their actualization into profits.[8] What appears as a real opportunity ex ante might
actually be a non-opportunity or one that cannot be actualized by entrepreneurs lacking the
necessary business skills, financial or social capital.

Traditionally, an entrepreneur has been defined as "a person who starts, organizes and manages
any enterprise, especially a business, usually with considerable initiative and risk".[9] "Rather than
working as an employee, an entrepreneur runs a small business and assumes all the risk and
reward of a given business venture, idea, or good or service offered for sale. The entrepreneur is
commonly seen as a business leader and innovator of new ideas and business
processes."[10] Entrepreneurs tend to be good at perceiving new business opportunities and they
often exhibit positive biases in their perception (i.e., a bias towards finding new possibilities and
seeing unmet market needs) and a pro-risk-taking attitude that makes them more likely to exploit the
opportunity.[11][12]

An entrepreneur is typically in control of a commercial undertaking, directing the factors of

production the human, financial and material resources that are required to exploit a business
opportunity. They act as the manager and oversee the launch and growth of an enterprise.
Entrepreneurship is the process by which an individual (or team) identifies a business opportunity
and acquires and deploys the necessary resources required for its exploitation. The exploitation of
entrepreneurial opportunities may include actions such as developing a business plan, hiring
the human resources, acquiring financial and material resources, providing leadership, and being
responsible for the venture's success or failure.[13] Economist Joseph Schumpeter (18831950)
stated that the role of the entrepreneur in the economy is "creative destruction" launching
innovations that simultaneously destroy old industries while ushering in new industries and
approaches. For Schumpeter, the changes and "dynamic disequilibrium brought on by the innovating
entrepreneur ... [are] the norm of a healthy economy."[14]

"Entrepreneurial spirit is characterized by innovation and risk-taking." [4] While entrepreneurship is

often associated with new, small, for-profit start-ups, entrepreneurial behavior can be seen in small-,
medium- and large-sized firms, new and established firms and in for-profit and not-for-profit
organizations, including voluntary sector groups, charitable organizations and government.[15] For
example, in the 2000s, the field of social entrepreneurship has been identified, in which
entrepreneurs combine business activities with humanitarian, environmental or community goals.

Entrepreneurship typically operates within an entrepreneurship ecosystem which often includes

government programs and services that promote entrepreneurship and support entrepreneurs and
start-ups; non-governmental organizations such as small business associations and organizations
that offer advice and mentoring to entrepreneurs (e.g., through entrepreneurship centers or
websites); small business advocacy organizations that lobby the government for increased support
for entrepreneurship programs and more small business-friendly laws and regulations;
entrepreneurship resources and facilities (e.g., business incubators and seed accelerators);
entrepreneurship education and training programs offered by schools, colleges and universities; and
financing (e.g., bank loans, venture capital financing, angel investing, and government and private
foundation grants). The strongest entrepreneurship ecosystems are those found in top
entrepreneurship hubs such as Silicon Valley, New York City, Boston, Singapore, and other such
locations where there are clusters of leading high-tech firms, top research universities, and venture
capitalists.[16] In the 2010s, entrepreneurship can be studied in college or university as part of the
disciplines of management or business administration.

Contents

History

Historical usage

Emil Jellinek-Mercedes (18531918), at the steering wheel of his Phoenix Double-Phaeton, was a European entrepreneur who helped
design the first modern car.

Entrepreneur ( i), is a loanword from French. First used in 1723, today the
term entrepreneur implies qualities of leadership, initiative, and innovation in new venture design.
Economist Robert Reich has called team-building, leadership, and management ability essential
qualities for the entrepreneur.[17][18] Historically the study of entrepreneurship reaches back to the
work in the late 17th and early 18th centuries of Richard Cantillon and Adam Smith, which was
foundational to classical economics.

Joseph Schumpeter

In the 20th century, entrepreneurship was studied by Joseph Schumpeter in the 1930s and
other Austrian economists such as Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek. The
term "entrepreneurship" was coined around the 1920s, while the loan from French of the
word entrepreneur dates to the 1850s. According to Schumpeter, an entrepreneur is willing and able
to convert a new idea or invention into a successful innovation.[19]Entrepreneurship employs what
Schumpeter called "the gale of creative destruction" to replace in whole or in part inferior offerings
across markets and industries, simultaneously creating new products and new business models.
Thus, creative destruction is largely responsible for long-term economic growth. The idea that
entrepreneurship leads to economic growth is an interpretation of the residual in endogenous growth
theory and as such continues to be debated in academic economics. An alternate description
by Israel Kirzner suggests that the majority of innovations may be incremental improvements such
as the replacement of paper with plastic in the construction of a drinking straw that require no special
qualities.

For Schumpeter, entrepreneurship resulted in new industries and in new combinations of currently
existing inputs. Schumpeter's initial example of this was the combination of a steam engine and then
current wagon making technologies to produce the horseless carriage. In this case, the innovation,
the car, was transformational, but did not require the development of dramatic new technology. It did
not immediately replace the horse-drawn carriage, but in time, incremental improvements reduced
the cost and improved the technology, leading to the modern auto industry. Despite Schumpeter's
early 20th-century contributions, the traditional microeconomic theory did not formally consider the
entrepreneur in its theoretical frameworks (instead of assuming that resources would find each other
through a price system). In this treatment, the entrepreneur was an implied but unspecified actor,
consistent with the concept of the entrepreneur being the agent of x-efficiency.

For Schumpeter, the entrepreneur did not bear risk: the capitalist did. Schumpeter believed that the
equilibrium was imperfect. Schumpeter (1934) demonstrated that the changing environment
continuously provides new information about the optimum allocation of resources to enhance
profitability. Some individuals acquire the new information before others and recombine the
resources to gain an entrepreneurial profit. Schumpeter was of the opinion that entrepreneurs shift
the Production Possibility Curve to a higher level using innovations.[20]