Abstract
The international environment, technological advances and societal changes bring about changing profiles and entrepreneurial behavior. The emergence in the literature of a new type of “lifestyle” entrepreneur is the most concrete example of this. In search of values and of reconciliation between professional and personal projects, he or she is concerned about the consequences of entrepreneurial activity in terms of social, familial and environmental impacts. The aim of this article is to introduce the “lifestyle” ideal type to the entrepreneurial theoretical corpus and better characterize their behaviors. To do this, we compare the classic ideal type and the “lifestyle” ideal type using the definition of an entrepreneur from a literature review and a multiple-case study. The results show that lifestyle entrepreneurs bring a unique offering to the market rather than seizing an opportunity, and have more confidence in their ability to combine resources than in their ability to recognize an opportunity; they develop their business globally due to their positioning in mainly niche markets, placing egalitarian values at the heart of the project; and they reveal themselves to be rather resistant to growth through employment.