Updated 20-Sep-2023
The entrepreneur is a creator. The businessperson is a destroyer. Enough said. This kind of dichotomy is annoying at best and completely fictional at worst. The reality is that the entrepreneur is to the businessperson as public relations is to propaganda. That is, they are the same, just better pr/propaganda. At the same time, there is a point to distinguish between mere business operations and entrepreneurship. Drucker does it best when he points out that entrepreneur has a kind of strategic or tactical approach which is akin to either competitor positioning, or the exploitation of an innovation of some kind (innovation being different than invention). But at the end of the day, the entrepreneur is a kind of businessperson, and is no different except in approach. The creation of value is the real thing, so lets' stop worshiping at the altar of entrepreneurship and treat these people as the businesspeople they are. In Southeast Asia the worship of the entrepreneur has not yet penetrated (other than fanboy tech circles) and so the term entrepreneur is simply not well understood. That of businessperson is. Someone who owns and/or operates a business. That is a well-known term. Much better than the more nebulous entrepreneur or even worse founder or co-founder, which is about an event in the past and not a real job description.