Another great article of my favorite column in “The Economist”. The last Schumpeter column (“The view from Liverpool“) is dedicated to entrepreneurial policies.

 

Policymakers tend to limit the promotion of entrepreneurship to the promotion of small businesses, regional development and employment. They should focus instead on the creation of big businesses that tend to disrupt established practices.

 

Policymakers also like to leave their mark on the landscape to future generations. When applied to entrepreneurial polices, this translates into the support for new incubation buildings that turn into entrepreneurs roach motels (they check in but they never leave…) and not accelerators like YCombinator and 500 Startups. Government supported creation of regional and local clusters has increasingly become established and prescribed policy. However, current challenges for high growth entrepreneurs, specially in Europe, requires a more distributed approach such as the one proposed by Rohit Shukla (“Supporting high growth entrepreneurs:  The Network-Centric approach to entrepreneurial assistance“)

 

Finally, the article refers the recommendations of a recent Kauffman Foundation report (“Startup Act for the States“) focusing on state policy recommendations to foster new enterprises: expand entrepreneurial education, simplify bankruptcy procedures, welcome immigrants, use new methods for speeding up the commercialization of innovations developed by faculty, etc.

 

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