Abstract
The health of the SMEs owner, as the first intangible asset of the entrepreneur, has been the subject of a trend of research for ten years, which tends to show that entrepreneurship is a vector of good health, although this health is subject to a greater range of emotions than that of employees. This doctoral work is part of this research by focusing on entrepreneurs with disabilities. This multidisciplinary thesis adopts an epistemological posture of interpretative type of inductive nature. Twenty entrepreneurs with disabilities who made an entrepreneurial transition (transition from wage-earning to entrepreneurship) were interviewed. In order to have a global understanding of this population, the type of disability, the date of the onset of the disability and the sector of activity were not selected as selection criteria to apprehend a wide variety of entrepreneurs in disability. Two aspects were studied in this doctoral work: entrepreneurs with disabilities and the entrepreneurial transition of people with disabilities.At the conceptual level, this doctoral research work has applied theories of entrepreneurial motivations and entrepreneurial salutogenesis. The results of this thesis highlight two findings: the centrality of disability in the life of the entrepreneur and the difficult alliance between entrepreneurship and disability.