Dr. Jeff Cornwall is the inaugural Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Dr. Cornwall's current research and teaching interests include entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics.
Though overall unemployment has reached 9.8%, hiring by small businesses is up almost 2% year to date according to SurePayroll’s Small Business Scorecard monthly survey. It is important that we clarify this glimmer of good news by clarifying that the increase is largely due to the fact that independent contractor hiring is up 14% year to date. But we will take any good news right now.
Click here to view the full SurePayroll Small Business Scorecard.
The Hitachi Foundation and the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship recently released a report titled “Weathering the Storm: The State of Corporate Citizenship in 2009.” The survey results show that due to the recession businesses have had to rethink – both good and bad – their approach to corporate citizenship.
The survey sample included 756 executives, 36% of whom were at small businesses
(1-99 employees), 24% at medium (100-999), and 40% at large companies
(1000 + employees). The survey found that large companies are responding to the recession much differently than small companies. For example, large companies significantly increased their investments and involvement in citizenship activities – but they were also more likely to lay people off. Small firms kept true to their emphasis on treating employees well by minimizing layoffs. But they significantly decreased attention to other aspects of citizenship, such as volunteering or philanthropy.
Some additional highlights of the survey:
The Wall Street Journal recognized the Top Small Workplaces in its third annual report featuring some of the best small employers in the U.S. The Journal Report on Small Business features the 15 winners in yesterday’s print and online editions.
Part of this feature was a column by Laura Lorber on web resources for small business owners, which included some recommended websites on organizing and funding your small business (all are great sites). She also recommended two sites that offer insights on entrepreneurship. Thanks for including The Entrepreneurial Mind as one of those two resources!
There is a useful post for those trying to utilize Twitter as marketing tool over at MyVenturePad. The post offers an example on using Twitter for lead generation.
In a newly released study supported by the Office of Advocacy and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies of New York University examined the impact of entrepreneurship education in higher education.
The study found that students who took an entrepreneurship class were more likely to have engaged in three types of “innovation”:
Not surprisingly, graduates who have taken entrepreneurship courses are significantly more likely to select careers in entrepreneurship.
The results suggest that there is a strong correlation between respondents having taken an entrepreneurial course and their self-reported skill in identifying new business-related opportunities.
To me opportunity identification is the single most important skill we can teach. It helps prevent businesses from being launched that are doomed to fail from the very start. It is a skill that also ensures proper positioning of viable opportunities.
Think you know what a small business is?
Thanks to years of rent seeking by advocates and lobbyists for various industries and trade organizations, the SBA needs a table that runs 37 pages plus footnotes just to define small business.
This is just one small example why we don’t need government steering our economy and making decisions about economic winners and losers.
I share a lot of information about today’s entrepreneurs and those who are just beginning their entrepreneurial journey. But what about those in the entrepreneurial pipeline?
Junior Achievement just released a survey of teenagers about their hopes and dreams for their future careers. What do they see in their future? Entrepreneurship.
They want their schools to help them learn how to become entrepreneurs. An amazing 92 percent believe that entrepreneurial skills should be taught in school – and 46 percent believe that during grades K-12 is the best time to learn entrepreneurial skills.
The survey also found that even in the face of uncertainty in the U.S. job market, more than half of teens – 51 percent — are interested in starting their own companies.
Here are more highlights from this survey:
The times they are a changin’….
I wrote a couple of posts yesterday on the resiliency of entrepreneurs and their ability to start new ventures even if venture capital is not flowing freely. In a post by Jonathan Ortmans at Policy Forum on Entrepreneurship Blog based on what he heard during a recent discussion among investors, he offers the following observation:
There was a universal agreement, bar one person, that now is an excellent time
for investors in new start-ups and that entrepreneurs should be cautious about
accepting too much outside capital. In fact, ironically, all three serious
start-ups I met last week had not accepted any outside funding at
all.
Let’s hope that scarce capital means more smarts and better success
rates for the entrepreneurs.
Forbes announced the winners of their America’s Most Promising Companies competition this past week.
It is interesting to note that only two of the twenty have gotten outside financing and that only one of these two companies have prior entrepreneurial experience.
Thought I’d share a little smile on a rainy Monday here in Nashville.