Applications to Futurpreneur, the national organisation that finances young Canadian entrepreneurs, rose 50 per cent last quarter, compared with 15 per cent growth a year earlier. Calgary , With more young Canadians considering self-employment amid a high youth unemployment rate, entrepreneurship programs are facing growing demand.
Both requirements reflect a common assumption: that the entrepreneurial impulse arrives in adulthood. Much research has made a similar assumption, looking for the social and professional influences that shape people after they enter university or the workforce.
MBA classmates can influence one another’s judgments about which ideas are viable, and university peers who start businesses can make entrepreneurship seem less risky. In a recent study, lead author Seok-Woo Kwon and colleagues found that the friends people make in high school may be associated with whether they become entrepreneurs decades later. Rather than waiting until young people reach adulthood, schools could instead create places where students interested in building things can find one another: through school ventures, maker spaces or small cohorts. Entrepreneurship policy should pay more attention to the social environments where entrepreneurial ambitions first take shape. For some, that process may have started long before they had a business idea or even thought of themselves as entrepreneurs: around the lunch table, back in high school. SKS
We know, for example, that co-workers who have previously run a business can make people notice opportunities they might otherwise miss. But these influences may begin earlier than researchers and policymakers have assumed.
