Entrepreneurship, Second Edition

1.6. CONCLUSION

Entrepreneurial activity in the United States now accounts for much of the nation's prosperity and its competitiveness in the global economy. The disappearance of "old" jobs, particularly in mature manufacturing industries, and their replacement by "new" jobs, especially in service and knowledge-based industries, is disconcerting to workers whose jobs are threatened. But society has to accept churning—the creation of new enterprises and the destruction of obsolete ones—because it gives the U.S. economy its vitality.

The entrepreneurial framework includes factors such as availability of finance, government policies and programs designed to support startups, R&D transfer, physical and human infrastructure, general education, specific education and training for entrepreneurship, social and cultural norms, and internal market openness. All of these factors combined determine the degree of entrepreneurial activity in a nation, or for that matter in a region within a nation. Among the large, developed nations, the United States sets the entrepreneurial benchmark. What's more, the so-called Anglo-Saxon economic systems seem to engender more entrepreneurial activity than systems dominated by the social model, which is the prevalent system in much of continental Europe. The question remains: How do both Anglo-Saxon and social economies find an entrepreneurial path that leads them out of the economic crisis?

In this chapter, we have looked at the importance of entrepreneurship ...