Schumpeter Consulting LLC had Dr. Joseph Alois Schumpeter in mind when
it fashioned its identity, set its direction, and shaped its core beliefs concerning business enterprise and personal wealth.
Perhaps more than any other economist, Dr. Schumpeter researched, reasoned,
and professed extensively about the relation existing between economic progress and entrepreneurial activity.
Dr. Schumpeter observed that social development and personal wealth
emanate from the sporadic changes brought about by creative individuals who innovate by devising new combinations, manifest
through
- New products
- New methods of production
- New markets
- New sources of supply
- New industrial arrangements
Schumpeter emphasized that the entrepreneur is the central agent-of-change
in transforming a stationary economy into a dynamic one.
The very heart of Schumpeter Consulting's socioeconomic philosophy
is inspired and shaped by Schumpeter, together with the ideas professed by the Austrian School of economic thought and its
many outstanding proponents and practitioners.
Born in 1883 in what is now the Czech Republic, Joseph Schumpeter
became lecturer at the University of Vienna and professor of economics, University of Czernowitz from 1901 to 1911.
He was then professor of economics, University of Graz, and an exchange professor
at Columbia University from 1911 to 1914, earning his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1913.
He then served as Austrian Minister of Finance from 1919 through
1920. Following an economics professorship at the University of Bonn, he
then became a visiting professor at Harvard University from 1925 through 1932, then full professor of economics at Harvard
until his death in 1950.
Among Dr. Schumpeter's most celebrated works is his Theory of Economic
Development, first published in 1911. This work, perhaps above all his others, inspired the Schumpeter Consulting
project starting in 1997, and is still invoked by many present day economists and business executives -- and perhaps too few
public policy makers -- as the preeminent treatise on the theory of entrepreneurism and economic growth.
Photo courtesy Harvard University Archives
