When I talk to colleagues who teach Entrepreneurship outside the US, or look at a text on Entrepreneurship written specifically for a foreign market, I am often struck by how differently they have to approach the topic. Much of their time is spent trying to create more entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurial spirit is not endemic to their culture. They try to find ways to entice and cajole people into entrepreneurial endeavors.
A recently released study from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor reinforces this observation. Unlike the US where we see a tremendous increase in young entrepreneurs including more and more young women, young women (18-24) in the UK are actually less likely to have entrepreneurial aspirations than other age groups. Given the trend toward a more entrepreneurially based world economy, this will prove to be a major barrier to future economic growth in cultures and societies that do not foster the entrepreneurial spirit.
Dr Jeff Cornwall
Co-founder of The Entrepreneurial Mind, serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship.
“The entrepreneurial spirit is not endemic to their culture.”
Do you mean endemic in the sense of “natural” or rather “prevalent”?
I have seen claims that Americans are simply more entrepreneurial by nature, but so far haven’t been convinced by them. The costs and benefits to entrepreneurship in the U.S. seems significantly different from those in the U.K. (disclaimer: unsupported assertion)
Socially or culturally fostering the entrepreneurial spirit may be a successful endeavor, but altering monetary incentives is an important ingredient independent of culture.
It takes much more than financial incentives, although they do matter to some degree. There seems to be a stronger sense that the state will provide in many cultures that have stronger socialistic histories. I think that creates a disincentive to take individual risks over generations. Also, in some cultures (I do not know this is true specifically in the UK) entrepreneurial spirit seems to be considered synonymous with a scam artist — they are considered sleazy within the cultural mores.
A Newsweek article from August titled “Capitalist Manifesto” had this to say about how entreprenership and markets are protrayed in some European textbooks:
“A recent study of German high-school textbooks by the Institute for the German Economy, in Cologne, found entrepreneurs–instead of getting credit for creating jobs–taking the blame for everything from unemployment to alcoholism to Internet fraud and cell-phone addiction. Some high-school social-studies textbooks teach globalization as an unmitigated catastrophe; students are advised to consult the radical anti-globalization protest group Attac for further information. In France, books approved by the Education Ministry promote statist policies and voodoo economics. “Economic growth imposes a way of life that fosters stress, nervous depression, circulatory disease and even cancer,” reports “20th-Century History,” a popular high-school text published by Hatier…Such blatant disinformation sheds new light on the debate over why it is that Europeans lag so far behind Americans in rates of entrepreneurship and job creation.”
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14206355/