Turning lead into gold: An anarchist perspective on public value in entrepreneurship research and education

For years the field of entrepreneurship has been blinded by the alchemical promise of turning lead into gold, of finding the ones most likely to become the next Branson, Zuckerberg or Gates. The promise has been created in the midst of political and scientific agendas where certain individuals, the geniuses, have been given extraordinary credit. Arguing against this Nietzschean point about hatching Übermenschen, I claim that it is not the goal of the many to lay the path for the few, to simply be used as catalysts in an alchemical process. From an anarchistic perspective, the goal is not to accumulate state or market wealth, but for entrepreneurial skills to become tools towards the liberation of the individual from oppressive systems of control – essentially to add public value rather than economic value. In this presentation I will sketch an anarchist perspective on entrepreneurship, looking further into its phronetic dimensions.