77

This article explains how entrepreneurship has emerged as an engine of growth, employment generation and competitiveness in global markets and why the economic role of entrepreneurship has changed so dramatically in the past half century. The changing role of entrepreneurship reflects three views of the economy, which correspond to three historical periods, and which can roughly be called the Capital Economy (Solow), which corresponds very roughly to the early post-war era, the Knowledge Economy (Romer), which roughly corresponds to the later post-war era (the 1980s), and the Entrepreneurial Economy, which may have its roots in the mid-1970s, but really took off in the 1990s.