‘Behold, I am making all things new’: The entrepreneur as savior in the age of creativity

SummaryThe entrepreneur is a character with many faces and many names. In this paper, I come across one of these faces as I read a Danish government report issued in year 2000: The Creative Potential of Denmark. This reading exhibits the discourse on entrepreneurship: it is constructed as a fairy tale. I further argue that the function of the fairy tale of the entrepreneur amounts to the saving of the world. More pointedly, I argue that the premise for this act of saving is the act of creation: The entrepreneur is a religious figure, and the practice with which we enact this figure in research entails faith and beliefs that science thought it had long abandoned. This relationship is traced back to logical positivism and August Comte's Church of Humanity. The analysis shows that the religious character of the entrepreneur can be traced through the history of entrepreneurship research and to religious myths of creation. The possible consequences of this for entrepreneurship research are finally considered.