Alas, the entrepreneurial flame is easier to put out than to light or relight. Governments across the world are determined to promote high-growth companies and the other accoutrements of an entrepreneurial society: can it be long before Kim Jong Un announces a North Korean venture-capital fund? But a collection of policymakers and academics assembled in Liverpool by the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes enterprise, all made it clear that this is easier said than done.
Policymakers have proved inept at promoting enterprise. For one thing, politicians focus on short-term election cycles and tend to junk their predecessors’ policies, good or bad. But there are also two bigger reasons. The first is that policymakers confuse promoting enterprise with promoting small businesses, regional development or job growth. In fact, serious entrepreneurs want to create big businesses, not multiply small ones. They don’t give a fig about regional development. And they habitually disrupt established patterns of employment rather than simply creating new jobs on top of the old.
The second is that policymakers are obsessed by Silicon Valley. The Russians claim to have built a clone of it near Moscow. Latvia aspires to create its own venture-capital industry. Universities everywhere are building high-tech “incubators”. Yet there is little evidence that the model is transferable. Most incubators are a bit like roach motels: would-be entrepreneurs check in but never leave. The venture-capital industry is in trouble in Silicon Valley itself, given the high rate of failure of start-ups, and is unlikely to flourish in Latvia. Rohit Shukla of the Larta Institute in California says policymakers should stop obsessing about clusters (which are usually the product of accident, not planning) and embrace global networks instead. The rise of the internet, the growing importance of emerging markets and the proliferation of networking organisations like the Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE, a group with members across 14 countries), all make it easier to link talent with opportunity around the world.
if indeed Northeast Ohio has a true entrepreneurial economy (which I beg to differ with the same as I do with the existence of a so called "entrepreneurial ecosystem") "Cleveland-Style" economic development and Ohio politics, which are in bed together, will destroy it.
No comments:
Post a Comment