“(Entrepreneurship). . .offer[s] a much more convenient access to. . .”

“. . . innovation in the large company benefited the entrepreneur as well. Schumpeter said, ‘(Entrepreneurship) within the shell of existing corporations can offer much more convenient access to the entrepreneurial functions than existed in the world of owner-managed firms. Many a would-be entrepreneur of today does not launch a firm, not because he could not do so, but simply because he prefers the other method.’ Thus, ‘new men’ founding ‘new firms’ were still vital to capitalism, but they were no longer the only agents of innovation. The same economic role could be accomplished within older and larger companies with entrepreneurial discipline.

Schumpeter pointed out that anti-trust lawyers should keep these points in mind when seeking to break up big firms. Presumably Schumpeter’s comment was in distant response to Supreme Court Justice Brandeis’ 1916 reference to the ‘curse of bigness’. Brandeis was convinced that bigness was not only socially destructive but economically and technologically unjustified. He saw its cause mainly in the greed or the drive for power of the ‘tycoon’. Brandies believe that uncurbed individual ambition – the rise of ‘Little Napoleons’ – was one of the causes of bigness, rather than economic efficiency. Schumpeter could not have disagreed more.”