For Joseph Schumpeter, the heart of the capitalist system was the entrepreneur – an extraordinary individual who had the foresight to see profit in new products or production processes as well as the tenacity to overcome any obstacles that stood in the way. Schumpeter believed that the rise of large firms in the early 20th century was making the entrepreneur obsolete. By investing in in-house research and development (R&D) laboratories staffed by teams of engineers and scientists, large firms had routinized the process of innovation, “depersonalized and autonomatized” technological change, so that the incremental advances were realized “as a matter of course.” In such an environment not only did “personality and will power,” and thus the entrepreneur, “count for less,” but the greater efficiency of large-scale enterprises was undermining the small- and medium-size firms that historically had been the spawning ground for heroic innovators with radically new ideas about how to do things. These developments, Schumpeter foretold, would have profound consequences for the entire society. Because entrepreneurs were the primary political supports for “private property and free contracting,” their eclipse would pave the way for socialist revolution.