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The opportunity and the entrepreneur
Published in Paul Trott, Dap Hartmann, Patrick van der Duin, Victor Scholten, Roland Ortt, Managing Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation, 2015
Paul Trott, Dap Hartmann, Patrick van der Duin, Victor Scholten, Roland Ortt
Two Austrian economists, Schumpeter and Kirzner, further discussed the two views. Schumpeter (1934) continued to elaborate on the uncertainty dimension. According to his view, not all entrepreneurs combine existing knowledge into new products or services, but the entrepreneur is someone who brings to society something that is completely new and, in doing so, reforms and revolutionizes a current situation and breaks with the past. His view is strongly based on the actions of an inventor – for instance, the invention of the steam engine by James Watt, which made tall ships redundant. The invention of the steam engine brought new applications into society. Schumpeter would argue that the innovation lies in something that is so radically new that it makes earlier applications useless. The steam engine was in itself a radical innovation, but the effect it had on industry was devastating as well. Figure 4.1 shows the transition from sail to steam, with the tonnage of goods transported by either sail or steam ships. Even knowing that companies might not immediately put their ships out of service, it still only needed some 20 years before steam ships took over the market. The shipbuilders who relied on sails and wind soon found out that their knowledge was pretty useless, because ship-owners replaced their sailing boats with steamships, for which the planning was more reliable and travelling time was shorter.
Bodies in networks: steamship mobilities and travel between Europe and Asia, 1869–1891
Published in Mobilities, 2023
While steamships were widespread on short routes in the first half of the 19th century (Armstrong and Williams 2007), constraints due to coal capacity made them inefficient for long distances. The first vessel to steam to India along the Cape Route in 1825 took 113 days because of engine and coal supply problems. In later decades, technological developments (the screw propeller and compound engine), combined with the opening of the Suez Canal, made steamship voyages between Europe and Asia much more widespread (Searight 1991). Creation of the new route enabled ships to save a significant amount of mileage on the journey to Asia. It was calculated that for voyages from London, the Suez Canal shortened the distance to Bombay by 41.2%, and voyages to Singapore by 28.8% in comparison with the Cape Route (Rabino 1887, 526). The new waterway was also more comfortable and faster than passing from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea on the overland route across Egypt. Of course, the trap of ‘technological evolution’ and ‘technological determinism’ should be avoided, and changes in the 19th-century travel experience cannot be reduced to a simple narrative about the triumph of steam (Legett and Dunn 2016, 5–6). Sailing ships still accounted for almost two thirds of the British merchant fleet’s total tonnage in the 1870s (Smith 2018, 285–303, 365). Nevertheless, travelling by steamship was usually faster, more comfortable and more reliable. A voyage between Europe and Asia was no longer a dangerous, arduous, many-months-long affair, so new opportunities for travel became available. The impact of steam was multifarious. As noted in the context of the Bay of Bengal, the steamship revolution ‘produced a new level of interconnectedness across the Bay as people, goods, and ideas moved back and forth at higher velocity and on a greater scale than before’ (Amrith 2013, 210). Migrations of workers from India and China drastically changed the demographic of some regions and fuelled the exploitation of resources. Transport of officials and troops supported European expansion (Headrick 1981, 129–156; Headrick 2010, 177–225), however steamships also became locus of anti-colonial resistance (Alexanderson 2020). Steam power and the Suez Canal also transformed traditional forms of mobility like the Muslim Hajj (Alexanderson 2020, 31–71; Huber 2013, 204–237). Tourists went from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe. Finally, not only privileged passengers travelled by steamships, but these were also used for transporting prisoners.