The hypothesis that the late Victorian entrepreneur exhibited less dynamism than his forebears and was therefore responsible for the relative decline of Britain's economic growth in comparison with Germany and the US has its origin in the comments of contemporaries, including Christopher Furness, who witnessed first-hand the burgeoning strength of the country's international rivals. From the 1940s to the 1970s, historians took up the theme and pointed to specific skill-based deficiencies including haphazard sales techniques, a slowness to adopt cutting-edge technology and an inability to see the benefits of applying science and higher education to business. These critics held that of all the variables that determine the rate of economic expansion, weak entrepreneurship was the main cause of Britain's slower growth. Others challenged allegations of specific deficiencies, drew attention to instances of dynamic leadership in Britain's service and distribution industries, developed quantitative studies showing that the country's performance was not as poor as earlier critics thought and emphasized the institutional and infrastructural constraints imposed by earlier development. Overall, the debate has centred around two central issues: skill deficiencies related to under-investment in education and science, and inappropriate social and cultural values that diverted talent away from business or preserved the family basis of business and thereby hindered the installation of modern management structures and practices. Scholars' evaluation of specific factors and their approach to these broad themes reflect various interpretations of entrepreneurship.

Theories of entrepreneurship consider several constituent roles including risk-taking, “creative destruction” and arbitraging, and these functions have been blended, as it were, by Mark Casson, who characterized entrepreneurial skill as “judgmental decision-making.” This term refers to nonroutine, unprecedented decisions. This concept's breadth is useful, for it can be applied to efforts designed to modify the internal constitution of an organization as well as attempts to change the firm's external business environment. Edith Penrose examined and connected both of these entrepreneurial foci from a theoretical perspective, but subsequent historians have tended to emphasize one or the other.