Very interesting piece on BusinessWeek.com today, “Is Entrepreneurship Declining.” John Tozzi gets two contrary points of view from two people I’m proud to know and admire: Scott Shane and Steve King. John picks up the right links:
Scott says yes and
Both pieces are well-written and well-researched. William Blake said, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, “anything possible to be believed is an image of truth.” I’ve always liked that quote.
Tozzie concludes:
I can’t argue with the entrepreneurship numbers. But as one of Scott’s commenters points out, you get different trend lines depending on where you start counting. I think there could be an inflection point around the beginning of this decade that reflects growth of new types of ventures. Curious to hear more thoughts on this in comments or on Twitter.
What do you think?
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I did a bit of research on this myself today, because I do not believe that entrepreneurship is declining. You may read the results at factorfictionblog.com; try using the link associated with my name above.
Basically, I think Steve may be right in arguing that some of Scott’s data excludes legitimate self-employed people in the U.S.
I also found additional data from the Kauffman Foundation that seems to contradict the findings about waning entrepreneurship as well.