The dictionary definition of entrepreneur is simply "a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture." So innovation can be helpful, especially in achieving a competitive advantage, it is not necessary (and certainly not sufficient) for successful entrepreneurship.

If, however, you do exactly what your competition is doing, the only risk you are taking is the one derived from being less competent than them.

The article's point is that if average is the best this generation can offer then it's doomed.

I think Scott (and you) are confusing average with boring. It's true that you can't be better without being different. But you can be different (and even be better) without being (at least overtly) innovative. You might just, for example, provide better customer service than the competition. Or lower prices. Or greater selection. My point is that to succeed, all you have to be is better. Being cool is not a requirement. (And being too focused on being cool can therefore actually be detrimental to success.)

"Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur"

Absolutely. Only in the "startup" scene are people so conceited as to think otherwise. Those pesky people running "normal" businesses with their pesky "profits", they aren't ENTREPRENEURS! Entrepreneurs are only the people wasting other people's money chasing new ideas that probably won't work out!

I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way.

I have to disagree here. This is a VC/Angel-inspired echo-chamber mindset. I can certainly see a difference between growth businesses and small shops, but it's really a disservice to attempt to devalue the latter by yanking the word entrepreneur out from under it even though:

  * It took no less courage for those business owners to start
  * They may well have taken much more personal risk in the form of a small 
  business loan
  * Those businesses far outnumber the growth business, especially the successful
  growth businesses
  * Those businesses tend to provide things people really need and have solid 
  revenue whereas a lot of "growth" businesses are pursuing the founders 
  fetishistic ideas that turn out to have no value whatsoever
  * Almost any business can be grown and/or extended laterally.  It proves a lot
  more if you can take a business from 0 to $250,000 revenue by yourself than it
  does that you burned $5,000,000 to get a 1,000,000 users and you're still not
  cash flow positive because you can't figure out how to get anybody to pay for
  your brilliant "invention" which actually just consists of a semi-novel way of
  shuffling user data around.

Anyway, I don't disagree that the top entrepreneurs should be more impressive. But I just had to speak up against your devaluation of the the world's full entrepreneurial class. An entrepreneur is someone who starts a business, period.

In business and technical circles the word 'entrepreneur' means doing something fundamentally new. There is no value judgment implied; entrepreneurs aren't necessarily superior to small-business owners. It's simply a matter of definitions.

Peter F. Drucker has a good explanation of this difference in his classic book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship". http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060851132/Innovation_...