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Good question. Note by "entrepreneurial endeavors" I meant start-ups, and not mom/pop "home businesses." Companies which plan to scale to a reasonable size (2
by dgallagher 17y ago
Good question. Note by "entrepreneurial endeavors" I meant start-ups, and not mom/pop "home businesses." Companies which plan to scale to a reasonable size (20-1000+ employees), essentially.
I've come to that perception from economic classes I took in college, and from general observation of start-ups. This is a good article which elaborates on entrepreneurial differences between the U.S. and Europe, citing economic, government, and social differences, among other things:
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13216037 http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?sto...
Noteworthy quote: "And far fewer start-ups in those countries become big businesses. Janez Potocnik, the EU commissioner for science and research, points out that only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%."
It's not that doing a start-up in Europe means you're doomed. There's just less of them which make it big.
Also, "Europe" encompasses a bunch of different nations with different attitudes and laws. The U.K. is much different than Finland, or Denmark, etc... So bunching them all together as I did isn't entirely fair.
If you look at one of the charts in the article, Denmark/Sweden/Finland all in-line with the U.S. when it comes to venture capital. If you look at Europe as a whole at the bottom of the chart, averaging all nations together, you see a much different picture.