Week 2 Reading Reflections

After reading this week’s selection, I was quite surprised by the “The Myths of Entrepreneurship” section of the text. The one myth that made me rethink the images of business moguls was entrepreneurs are not born but made. I had always heard the reference “well they are just business savvy”, and always assumed the person being referred to has always been successful in every venture they have taken on. Like the notion that leaders are made not born, entrepreneurs learn and evolve through a series of mistakes, learnings, and connecting with others. Through their evolutionary journey an entrepreneur refines their mindsets and focuses on what is working in order to be successful. What I found confusing about the text was the integrative approach to the entrepreneurial process. The concept of the integrative approach is easier to understand on the model than it was written in the text, in my opinion. Two questions I would ask the author would be:

1.       Why was there not anything brought up about how economies of scale effect the survival of gazelle companies in the data presented?

2.       With the global economy continuing to evolve and merge, what external factors do you think will affect entrepreneurs more in the future than today?

The bullet point of how entrepreneurship does not impact an economy simply through higher numbers of entrepreneurs, in the section of “The Entrepreneurial Revolution: A Global Phenomenon”, is one concept that I would disagree with or rather explore deeper. I know the author was focusing on the quality of entrepreneurs within a particular market; however, if there is a large number of entrepreneurs would the failures/successes effect the market’s economy from a job creation/loss statistic. Another point to consider is how the failures/successes of a high concentration of entrepreneur effects other businesses as in suppliers, for example. Also, would the failures/successes lead to a decrease or increase in regulations within that economy. These are a few points that I considered when thinking about the overall impact of an economy’s entrepreneurial concentration. I understand the author was pointing out that the more quality measures (growth, innovation, and internationalization) provide better understanding in the study of entrepreneurship; however studying the effects of larger concentrations of entrepreneurs within an economy, or even specific markets within the economy, can provide a wealth of data toward understanding the impact entrepreneurs have on whether positive or negative on an economy.