I recently found this short and very compelling video from the Kauffman Foundation on enabling entrepreneurship. It is worth watching and kinda necessary for the rest of this post as critique.
Here are my comments...
Growth: The approach in the video seems to advocate for a gross measurement of growth as any new enterprise any where which buys in to the all growth is good growth myth.
Failure: There is an assumption that "improving" the failure rate of new enterprises will improve the economy which brings up the question about how many of new companies "should" fail? Is the failure rate a useful filtering mechanism? Our economic structure is such that there is very little penalty for failure. It may be that failure 1) keeps "bad" businesses out of the market, 2) improves the skills of new entrepreneurs. Additionally, I would love to see a formal way for entrepreneurs to be able to, as Clay Shirkey says, fail informatively.
Success: This statement is in the video: "People would start more businesses if they were more certain of their success." There are many assumptions embedded here. What we don't want to do is weaken any market physics in an effort to increase the success rate. This is where people start yelling about subsidy and market distortion. How do we answer these concerns?
Maximize: There is a section of the video on finding the levers for increased growth of individual companies. I am an advocate of maximizing existing efforts so this makes sense to me. However, the levers discussed in the video all revolve around growth in a value-free way, just financial growth for the casino economy. It is my belief that this paradigm is dead and we now need to understand growth in terms of progress towards solutions and emergence where cooperation helps 1+1=3.
Comments