THE ANATOMY OF AN ENTREPRENEUR

While getting connected to an old business associate of mine who is an entrepreneur in US now, I happened to read his blog wherein he had recommended for reading a report of the Kauffman Foundation on entrepreneurship, Kansas city, Missouri, USA. Titled, The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur, it centers on the entrepreneur’s family background and motivations. Researched and prepared by Vivek Wadhwa, Associate Director, Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University and Senior Research Associate, Harvard Law School, Raj Aggarwal, Dean and Sullivan Professor, College of Business Administration, The University of Akron, Krisztina “Z” Holly, Executive Director, USC Stevens Institute for Innovation, University of Southern California and Alex Salkever, visiting Researcher, Masters of Engineering Management Program, Pratt School of Engineering, Duke University, the report through structured data, had given deep insights into entrepreneurs and their family back ground. I reproduce below the conclusions from the last page of the report:

“The core findings of this research are straightforward and contradict some prevailing stereotypes. In the industries we researched, entrepreneurs are more likely to come from a middle-class or upper lower- class background, and very few come from backgrounds of extreme wealth or extreme poverty. These entrepreneurs are usually well educated, with only 5 percent reporting having less than a bachelor’s degree. They also are likely to be better educated than their parents were, with half their fathers and a third of their mothers having at least bachelors’ degrees. They performed well in high school and in college, with the vast majority ranking average or above in their respective institutions. Entrepreneurs don't always come from families of entrepreneurs; slightly more than half of the samples were the first in their families to launch businesses. On average, entrepreneurs tend to be the middle child in a three-child household. They are significantly more likely to be married and have children when they launch their first businesses. Entrepreneurs are far more likely to have worked for an employer for more than six years than to have quickly launched their own businesses. Their primary motivations for launching a business are to build wealth, to own their own company, and to capitalize on a business idea they had. The findings perhaps provide some clues about what conditions might be helpful in supporting entrepreneurs and helping them become successful. Entrepreneurs typically are well-educated and experienced. In other words, they largely come from the existing workforce and not from college. They have ideas they want to commercialize, are motivated to build wealth, and like the idea of being their own bosses in a startup. These observations are based on initial analysis of the data. But these observations could perhaps be useful guideposts for the next round of inquiry that attempts to understand not only the background and broad motivations of entrepreneurs but also the deeper formative factors that influence this select and incredibly important class of individuals.”

A full report of the same can been viewed at http://www.kauffman.org/uploadedFiles/ResearchAndPolicy/TheStudyOfEntrepreneurship/Anatomy%20of%20Entre%20071309_FINAL.pdf

What I immediately did was a comparison of their findings with that of mine and almost 95% of my entrepreneurial odyssey matches with their findings. I felt it necessary to do this post with the executive summary of the Kauffman report so that it can motivate and guide young budding entrepreneurs. They could find the critical success factors from this report and plan their entrepreneurial journey accordingly.

Happy reading and all the very best?