(Listening across America on Rural Entrepreneurship Continued from Page 1)
Why are so many people interested in entrepreneurship?
According to a monograph from the Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, New data show that less than 1% of new job creation now comes from business relocations. The other 99% come from the expansion of existing businesses (55%) and new start-ups (44%). (Center for Rural Entrepreneurship, “The Case for Entrepreneurship” Monograph 2, June 2003).An international study by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (http://www.gemconsortium.org/) found that the direct correlation between the level of entrepreneurial activity and economic growth is greater than 70%.
Newly emerging economic development strategies that feature entrepreneurship often revolve around approaches that center on how to foster a creative economy by linking innovation and entrepreneurship. In recent years a plethora of regional economic development plans outline strategies to increase innovation and enhance systems to support entrepreneurial efforts. Rural residents reviewing these plans more often than not see a focus on the metro environment with rural as a residual category providing workforce and second homes. For these rural leaders and community members, this dismissal of rural as solely a source of second homes and labor rather than of innovation and/or entrepreneurship has motivated rural people to mine local talents and business opportunities connected to entrepreneurial efforts on their own.
In addition, more and more rural communities, however, recognize that economic development as usual will not turn around long-term trends in declining population and declining per capita income. In many cases these trends have been exacerbated by regional economic development strategies that focused on bringing big boxes to the area. The acute decline in the number of young persons in rural places has encouraged community leaders to discard traditional attraction strategies and seek approaches that offer opportunities for young people to stay in, or return to, the community. Finally, the graying of Main Street USA could lead to the demise of remaining downtown retail stores in communities where transition efforts are not in place. Seeing this transition as an opportunity for entrepreneurial development has led rural communities to create new kinds of collaboratives, to provide concrete opportunities for young people, and to find ways to enhance the viability of the Main Street businesses.
Maps 2 and 3 show the incidence of entrepreneurs and the amount of revenue earned by these small businesses. Listening session participants read these maps not as something to cry about, but rather as a landscape of opportunity.
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