(2014-10-19) Davison Fourth Economy Popularizing Entrepreneurship

Ron Davison: The Fourth Economy: Popularizing Entrepreneurship

The question, What will give us the highest marginal return? Would it come from adding another trillion dollars to capital markets? Another million to the number of college graduates (College Degree)? Or another hundred thousand entrepreneurs? It seems obvious that it is the entrepreneurs who would create the most jobs and wealth.

If that’s true, even poor efforts to popularize entrepreneurship will have more positive impact than great efforts to further popularize knowledge work.

More important to them was access to a talented workforce, proximity to customers, and a community they wanted to live in. (And quality of life didn’t just make a place desirable for the entrepreneurs: it helped to attract and keep the talented workforce they sought.)

Just as it has with the popularization of knowledge work, communities could do more to advertise the importance of entrepreneurship, creating more programs in schools.

from all of Gallup’s data and research on entrepreneurship, what will most likely tell you if you are winning or losing your city … [is] 5th to 12th graders’ image of and relationship to free enterprise and entrepreneurship

the biggest changes may well come from within corporations, from policies that will make employees more entrepreneurial.

Steve Blank recently said, “Corporate entrepreneurship and innovation will be the next big thing for the next 10 years, and the business school that sets up a program for that will be printing money from executive education and gradating a cadre of MBAs who will be snapped up by large companies that are desperate to reintroduce innovation inside their corporations.

history provides us with some interesting examples of how best to unleash potential. Whether it is with religion, politics, or finance, progress has been about dispersing control from those at the top—whether they be popes, monarchs, or bankers — to those throughout the organization. Progress increases autonomy and gives people more choice about how to live and work. This same pattern will likely hold for the transformation of the corporation as the power of CEOs is more widely dispersed to employees who act more like entrepreneurs

In July, the American economy created about 5 million jobs[1]. In just one month. You probably didn’t hear about this because during that same month it lost nearly 5 million jobs. The net gain for that month was 243,000 jobs,[2] but the economy had to create 20 jobs for every one job it gained

A vibrant economy needs to continually create jobs. To do that, it needs to continually create entrepreneurs.