The paper presents a concept of basic psychological types of economic agents, which was developed with a cross-disciplinary perspective uniting management theory and psychology. We start with the role of entrepreneurs as drivers of economic development and highlight the significance of these individual innovators in the current economy, often referred to as transforming from a “managerial” to an “entrepreneurial” regime. The entrepreneurial ventures and SMEs (small and medium-sized enterprises) are now widely regarded as the primary innovation engines and the main providers of employment and economic growth. Leaving behind large, long-established firms, they come to play a decisive role in the transformation of knowledge-based economies.
Turning to the characteristics of individual players, we look at three conventional types of economic agents (the Entrepreneur, the Manager and the Investor) and then introduce into the business vocabulary a new category – business “Epigones”. We describe the distinctive features of the four types and show that Epigones fall in between Entrepreneurs and Managers personality types. Finally, we conclude that “epigonous entrepreneurship” as an important factor of economic growth offers a high potential for developing economies such as Russia and that this promising trend should be considered when designing government policies and programs to support entrepreneurship.
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