Fundamentals of Business

Enterprise

Enterprise involves the combination and organisation of land, labour and capital to make goods and services - entrepreneurs are the individuals who take on such business ventures and their associated risk.

Human capital and intellectual capital.

Human capital is acquired through education and training, whether formal or on-the-job. A more recent coinage is intellectual capital; Intellectual capital is a term with various definitions in different theories of management and economics. Accordingly its only truly neutral definition is as a debate over economic "intangibles".

Ambiguous combinations of human capital, instructional capital and individual capital employed in productive enterprise are usually what is meant by the term, when it is used to actually refer to a capital asset whose yield is intellectual rights.
Prior to the Information Age the land, labour, and capital were used to create substantial wealth due to their scarcity.

Compensation and measurement

Wage is a basic compensation for labour, and the compensation for labour per period of time is referred to as the wage rate. The two terms are sometimes used interchangeably. Division of Labour (organisation structure) who does what in economics, separation of the work involved in production and trade into processes performed by different workers or groups of workers.

Separation of the productive process into individual operations, each performed by different groups of workers, is a feature of most modern factories, and underpins the "production line" technique of working. For example, the car consists of thousands of parts, each requiring a number of distinct manufacturing processes.

Many of these parts are manufactured in plants devoted solely to the production of those particular items; within these plants the productive process is divided among different groups of workers, each of whom has a specialized task to perform. The major advantage of the technical division of labour is greater productivity, which results from several factors.

The most important are a marked increase in individual and collective efficiency due to specialization and the increase in skill that specialization provides;
economy in training of workers, especially with respect to time;
economy resulting from the continuous use of tools that would otherwise remain idle during part of the working time as workers move from process to process;
and the development of highly productive, specialized tools, machinery, and equipment.