In 2016, Hjorth & Holt asked: what if entrepreneurship is not about seizing opportunities, but about generosity? Nearly a decade later, we went back to ask what they still stand by and what they’d say now.
In 2010, Ai Weiwei filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall with 100 million handmade porcelain seeds, produced by approximately 2,000 artisans in Jingdezhen over five years. Eight days in, the Tate fenced it off, dust hazard, and visitors were pocketing the seeds.
Hjorth & Holt use this case to draw a line most entrepreneurship research ignores: enterprise and entrepreneurship are not the same thing. Enterprise is individual, output-focused, opportunity seized for economic gain. Entrepreneurship, they argue, is collective, social, and open-ended, possibility produced without scripted ends.
The distinction has a practical edge. As Hjorth puts it: if you reduce entrepreneurship to exploiting opportunities for profit, study it as management. Calling it entrepreneurship is a category error.
📖 Read their paper here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S235267341630004X
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