An entrepreneurial expert

If you think of entrepreneurship, you probably think of individuals. Say Richard Branson, now in New Zealand with Virgin Blue, Annita Roddick of the Body Shop or, more locally, Dick Hubbard or Stephen Tindall. Here they are, swashbuckling forth, toppling the status quo, creating wealth and opportunities and providing us, along the way, with superior products and services. We should, we feel, be more like them.

As a culture we are newly in love with entrepreneurism, with the idea of being entrepreneurs. But while there are plenty of puff-piece magazine stories and biographies lionising individual entrepreneurs, plenty of ‘how to’ and motivational books, there’s very little published empirical and theoretical research into entrepreneurship or the conditions that foster it. This is a shame, for if we don’t understand entrepreneurship, how can we encourage it?

If there is a person who knows the state of research into entrepreneurship in New Zealand better than anyone else, it is must be Albany-based Professor Anne de Bruin, who with her colleague, Ann Dupuis, is the co-editor of the recently published Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives in a Global Age. Two of the chapters in this twelve-chapter, densely-referenced, academic text have been authored by de Bruin, and she has co-authored another eight.

What makes for an entrepreneur? The answer you give may be a clue to where you are from. In New Zealand, Australia and Britain entrepreneurs are seen as being distinctively innovative, opportunistic and risk-taking; in America and Canada the view is more that anyone in small business is an entrepreneur.

The book nicely skirts the problem by defining entrepreneurship as a continuum. Branson sits on the continuum, but then so does the woman selling clothes at the Otara fleamarket. The book also adopts an approach of ‘embeddedness’: placing the entrepreneurial activity within the context of the surrounding social environment.

The book has chapters on familial entrepreneurship, indigenous entrepreneurship, youth entrepreneurship, ethical entrepreneurship and community entrepreneurship. Of particular relevance, given the rapidly-ageing profile of New Zealand’s population, is a chapter on elder entrepreneurship. In the Netherlands and the UK 10 percent of people starting new businesses have been found to be age 50 and over. Hearteningly, these businesses have good survival rates: they are three times more likely to survive than businesses started by people in their teens or twenties.

Entrepreneurship can also be a part of government, both local and central. Just as the private sector can use resources in new ways to maximise productivity and efficiency, so too can the public sector. Entrepreneurship: New Perspectives in a Global Age has chapters on Municipal-Community Entrepreneurship and State Entrepreneurship.

In the latter, de Bruin proposes that the term welfare state no longer properly describes the function of the state in the global age and that a new term, the ‘strategic state’, should be employed. The strategic state acts entrepreneurially, and exhibits opportunity-related strategic behaviour.

You can find expressions of the strategic state in Industry New Zealand, in the Ministry of Economic Development, in aspects of the Tertiary Education Commission and most explicitly in the 2002 policy framework, Growing an Innovative New Zealand, which sees the state assuming leadership in strategies for economic development that are based on fostering an effective innovation culture.

It seems entrepreneurship, far from being the province of the élite few, is everywhere.