Abstract: The Schumpeterian entrepreneur drives the capitalist process through the introduction of innovations. Alternately impetuous boxer and Don Quixote of the production functions, the entrepreneur is part of a creative process by which emerge novelties which upsets existing economic structures. The “ride” of the entrepreneur cannot be reduced to cost-benefit calculations, but falls under a logic of the gift: the entrepreneur “creates without respite, because he can do nothing else”. Nevertheless, he is at the origin of a capitalist economy founded on private property and profit. Capitalism belongs to the logic of economy, that is to say, to a system of appropriation which excludes all forms of gift and gratuitousness. This paper intends to question the apparent tension between a regime of gift and a regime of appropriation in order to highlight the ambivalence of the economic creation.
