ENTREPRENEUR 1.1 MEANING: An entrepreneur is one of the important segments of economic growth. Basically he is a person responsible for setting up a business or an enterprise. In fact he is one who has the initiative, skill for innovation and who looks for high achievements. He is a catalytic agent of change and works for the good of people. He puts up new green field projects that create wealth, open up many employment opportunities and leads to the growth of other sectors. The word ‘entrepreneur’ is derived from the French verb entreprendre. It means “ to undertake”. In the early 16 th century, the Frenchmen who organized and led military expeditions were referred to as “entrepreneurs”, Around 1700 A.D., the term was used for architects and contractors of public works. The term “ entrepreneur” was applied to business initially by the French economist, Caltillon, in the 18 th century, designate a dealer who purchases the means of production for combining them into marketable products. Another Frenchman J.B. Say, expanded Cantillon’s ideas and conceptualized the entrepreneur as an organizer of a business firm, central to its distributive and production functions. Beyond stressing the entrepreneur’s importance to the business, Say did little with his entrepreneurial analysis. According to J.B.Say, an entrepreneur is the economic agent who unties all means of production, the labour force of the one and the capital or land of the other and who finds in the value of the products his results from their employment, the reconstitution of the entire capital that he utilizes and the value of the wages, the interest and the rent which he pays as well as profit belonging to himself. He emphasized the functions of co- ordination, organization and supervision. Further, it can be said that the entrepreneur is an organizer and speculator of a business enterprise. The entrepreneur lifts economic resources out of an area of lower into an area of higher productivity and greater. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica considers an entrepreneur as “ an individual who bears the risk of operating a business in the face of uncertainty about the future condition.