Here Comes the Entrepreneurial Generation!

The Entrepreneurial Mind:

The last great period when entrepreneurs transformed the American economy was in the late 1800s. In fact, most of the 1997 Fortune 200 were already among the largest corporations by 1917 and almost all of these companies started as entrepreneurial ventures. These businesses helped to shape the American economy, society and culture for the next century.

The 1970s was the beginning of the end of this economic era. The large corporations formed in the last great entrepreneurial era in America were no longer creating new jobs in significant numbers. Total employment by the Fortune 500 companies has dropped from 20% of US workforce in 1980, to about 7% in the late 1990s. In fact, the Fortune 500 has actually lost over 5 million jobs during the past 20 years.

Over the past decade or so, the emergence of a new entrepreneurial economy in America has begun. There has been significant growth in entrepreneurial start-ups and small businesses now are the engine of this economy. The number of small businesses has grown steadily: 4.5 million small businesses in 1955, to 18 million by the late 1980s, to 23 million today. New business formation has grown from about 200,000 per year in mid 1900s to over 3.5 million per year in the early twenty-first century.

Photo by carlosluis.

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