<P> In the 2000s, usage of the term "entrepreneurship" expanded to include how and why some individuals (or teams) identify opportunities, evaluate them as viable, and then decide to exploit them . The term has also been used to discuss how people might use these opportunities to develop new products or services, launch new firms or industries, and create wealth . The entrepreneurial process is uncertain because opportunities can only be identified after they have been exploited . </P> <P> Entrepreneurs tend exhibit positive biases towards finding new possibilities and seeing unmet market needs, and a tendency towards risk - taking that makes them more likely to exploit business opportunities . </P> <P> "Entrepreneur" (/ ˌɒ̃trəprəˈnɜːr, - nj ʊər / (listen), UK also / - prɛ - /) is a loanword from French . The word first appeared in the French dictionary entitled Dictionnaire Universel de Commerce compiled by Jacques des Bruslons and published in 1723 . Especially in Britain, the term "adventurer" was often used to denote the same meaning . The study of entrepreneurship reaches back to the work in the late 17th and early 18th centuries of Irish - French economist Richard Cantillon, which was foundational to classical economics . Cantillon defined the term first in his Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en Général, or Essay on the Nature of Trade in General, a book William Stanley Jevons considered the "cradle of political economy". Cantillon defined the term as a person who pays a certain price for a product and resells it at an uncertain price, "making decisions about obtaining and using the resources while consequently admitting the risk of enterprise". Cantillon considered the entrepreneur to be a risk taker who deliberately allocates resources to exploit opportunities in order to maximize the financial return . Cantillon emphasized the willingness of the entrepreneur to assume the risk and to deal with uncertainty, thus he drew attention to the function of the entrepreneur and distinguished between the function of the entrepreneur and the owner who provided the money . </P> <P> Jean - Baptiste Say also identified entrepreneurs as a driver for economic development, emphasizing their role as one of the collecting factors of production allocating resources from less to fields that are more productive . Both Say and Cantillon belonged to French school of thought and known as the physiocrats . </P>

Who introduced the term entrepreneur first in economics