Introduction

Schumpeter was a scholar of awesome breadth and depth (Galambos, 1996). His legacy is a gold mine of ideas, insights and intuitions on a number of topics such as economic change and growth, entrepreneurship, innovation, capitalism and democracy. Some of his early ideas, insights and intuitions have yet to be fully explored.

Several scholars have built upon Schumpeter's ideas and tested them empirically. Specifically, the last twenty years has seen a revival of interest in his work from evolutionary economics. The result of these efforts is an improvement in our understanding in a number of areas such as the dynamics and evolution of specific industries (Breschi et al., 2000); the dynamic relations among technology, growth and trade (Fagerberg, 2003); systems of innovation (Freeman, 1994); and evolutionary modelling (Nelson and Winter, 1982).

However, in some areas that are the core of Schumpeter's work our knowledge has not progressed evenly; one of these areas is entrepreneurship. Schumpeter made several major contributions to this area of knowledge and provided powerful insights on a number of issues, such as theorising about entrepreneurship being a crucial factor in economic development, highlighting the creative character of entrepreneurial action and arguing the complementary role of economics, sociology and history in analysing economic change in general, and entrepreneurship in particular. Moreover, along with Weber and few other intellectual giants, Schumpeter understood ‘how particular agents shaped history and how social structures shaped the actions of those agents’ (Galambos, 1996: 930); this is a very sophisticated and challenging way of viewing the phenomenon of social interaction that we call ‘networks’.