entrepreneurship

Immigrant entrepreneurs would be allowed to remain in the United States for an initial period of up to two years, and, conditional upon meeting certain benchmarks, could potentially stay in the country for one additional period of up to three years under a newly proposed rule by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) branch of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS). As part of the International Entrepreneur Rule, which is now open for a 45-day comment period, certain international entrepreneurs would have an opportunity to start or scale their businesses in the United States.  

As policymakers and economic developers grow to recognize the need to create broader opportunities for prosperity to sustain future national competitiveness, four facts reveal one of the complex and compounding factors hampering productive participation from a significant segment of our population:  

In an effort to advance entrepreneurship among their student bodies and grow their regional entrepreneurship ecosystems, six historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) will receive up to $24,000 in support services as part of a new program from the Delta Regional Authority. Funds from the HBCU Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Initiative will primarily be used for universities to work with partners to identify entrepreneurial resources within the regional system, categorize strengths and weaknesses, and to strategically build around opportunities. Additionally, the selected schools will each host a two-day technical assistance and rapid acceleration workshop that seeks to teach student entrepreneurs about the types of skills and resources needed to launch and scale businesses. Student entrepreneurs will then pitch their ideas for a chance to be selected to present at Founders Weekend, where finalists will receive mentorship with successful minority entrepreneurs, business model development, and other services.

Two recently released indices assess countries and cities on the characteristics that enable female entrepreneurship. The 2015 Female Entrepreneurship Index finds the U.S., Australia, the U.K., Denmark and the Netherlands offer the world’s most attractive environments for high-potential female entrepreneurship. Meanwhile, the Dell Women Entrepreneur Cities Index ranks New York City, California’s Bay Area, London, Stockholm and Singapore as the top cities for female entrepreneurship. These indices may be useful to policymakers who are limited in their knowledge of the conditions that enable entrepreneurship, especially among females and other underrepresented communities.

When employees discover potentially significant inventions during their line of work, they can decide whether to leave their company and form a new startup around the idea, or to transfer the knowledge to the parent firm and attempt to gain financial compensation through a spinoff.  As seen in the 2016 summary report from Failure Aversion Change in Europe (FACE) Entrepreneurship, the two main fears for entrepreneurs are financial security and losing a stable, professional job. Recent research also suggests that granting employees extended leaves of absence with guaranteed options for returning increases the likelihood of entrepreneurship.  Coupled together, these results prompted SSTI to further review the relationship between corporate-leave policies and entrepreneurship.

Newly released research from the Kauffman Foundation finds that in 2016, Washington, D.C., Austin, San Jose, Columbus, and Nashville were the five highest ranked metropolitan areas for the Index of Growth Entrepreneurship. The five highest ranked states were Virginia, Utah, Maryland, Arizona, and Massachusetts. As described in the SSTI Digest last week, The Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship measures the growth of entrepreneurial businesses in the United States, complementing the foundation’s recently released Index of Startup Activity and Index of Main Street Entrepreneurship.

Although the growth of young entrepreneurial businesses has increased it has not yet returned to pre-Recession levels, according to new research from the Kauffman Foundation.  The Kauffman Index of Growth Entrepreneurship measures the growth of entrepreneurial businesses in the United States. In 2016, the index experienced the largest year-over-year increase in the last decade, according to its authors, Kauffman researchers Arnobio Morelix, E.J. Reedy, and Joshua Russell. Despite this uptick, however, entrepreneurial growth is still down compared to the levels experienced in the 1980s and 1990s.

One of the recurring characteristics of entrepreneurs, based on numerous biographies and case studies, is a driven self-confidence that may border, in some circles, as excessive or even narcissistic. Closer scrutiny, of course, shows there is no such thing as the “self-made” person, but entrepreneurship still is described often as a heroic, lone-wolf quest. Is it paradoxical to advocate for and even expect mentoring and “how to” entrepreneurship training to work? Wouldn’t “real” entrepreneurs leading promising startups succeed without the advice? A recent working paper describes an experiment that attempted to address this issue.

Todd Connor, CEO of Bunker Labs, begins his pitch in front of a Startup Week event in Columbus, Ohio with a compelling statistic. In the six years following WWII, 50 percent of returning veterans started their own businesses. Today, only 6 percent of post-9/11 vets do the same, despite surveys showing four times that number would like to do so.  What has changed to lead to such a contrast and entrepreneurship gap?