Smart grids are currently presented as ?the? technological solution to meet the challenge of a sustainable energy transition. The aim of this article is to understand the current process of transformation of electrical systems in Europe and examine the mechanisms at work that contribute to make...

Jean-Baptiste Say and Joseph Aloïs Schumpeter are two key-economists in the theory of the entrepreneur. Both assigned to the entrepreneur the role of an economic engine, moved by innovation. Moreover, both lived in periods characterized by a flow of economic and political new ideas (Say : the...

While the history of luxury, as a craft activity, is a very long one, the luxury goods industry as we currently know it, is relatively young. At the end of the 19th century some entrepreneurs created a new industrial logic focused on luxury goods. Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin-Cliquot (Champagne),...

The Schneider company, founded in 1836, by Eugène and Alphonse Schneider is presented in this article as an answer to a double scientific issue. On the first hand, we analyse the tight links between industrial development and military activity, and in the other hand the basis of the individual...

Economists often praise entrepreneurs' merits since they challenge market routine and give life to capitalism. But, paradoxically (?), the entrepreneur holds a marginal place in economic progress historical approaches. Is he a deus ex machina who intervenes when economists do not know how (or do...

For keynesian economists, social economy is able to solve the problems of unemployment and poverty in industrialized countries. However, neither poverty nor the debates on social economy are new. 200 years ago, socialists and other utopians imagined a society where market principles were...

Since the beginning of the 1990?s, the social entrepreneur has become a fundamental actor within capitalism. But, what is a social entrepreneur, one must ask? The question is debated and defies consensus. Is an entrepreneur social because he founds a nonprofit enterprise? If so, then how can he...