The Institute for Justice has an inspiring series of five reports on the beneficial effects of entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurs themselves and on their communities. The reports also highlight the entrepreneurs’ struggles against unnecessary regulations. Says the author of one report: “If the impact of this one entrepreneur in a relatively small Mississippi community can be as wide and deep as documented in this report, imagine the transformation entire communities of unhampered entrepreneurs could create in America’s largest cities where hope and opportunity are in such great demand.”
The Spring 2010 issue of The Journal of Private Enterprise, published by the Association of Private Enterprise Education, has just been released. It contains articles by leading Austrian School economists Israel Kirzner, Peter Boettke, and CEE guest speaker Steven Horwitz. See the journal’s website for more details.
Below is a short video interview of Steven Horwitz, conducted during his Spring 2009 visit.
Entrepreneurship is becoming more popular in Brazil, despite the relative difficulty of starting a business there and the complexity of the country’s tax system.
Two weeks ago, the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship explored entrepreneurship in Turkey. Now Jonathan Ortmans looks at Saudi Arabia and finds a very entrepreneurial country. For example, it is ranked number 13 out of 183 economies for “ease of starting a business” (the U.S. is number 8).
The Kauffman Foundation’s Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship has a fascinating article on entrepreneurship in Turkey. Why, asks author Jonathan Ortmans, does Turkey have such a low rate of entrepreneurship when it is so strong economically?
Jeffrey Orduno, Rockford College alum and associate at McGreevy Williams, gave a CEE-sponsored talk last week at Rockford College. Here is Stephen Hicks’s interview with him on property rights and the law:
Judy Estrin, CEO of JLabs, is the co-founder of seven technology companies. She was the Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Systems from 1998 to 2000 and has served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. Currently, she is on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company and FedEx, the advisory board of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board. Most recently, she is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap (McGraw-Hill, 2008). We met with Ms. Estrin in Menlo Park, California to explore her thoughts on educating and managing for entrepreneurship and innovation.
Kaizen: What was it like growing up in a high-powered science-and-engineering family?
Estrin: That’s hard to answer because I don’t know anything but growing up steeped in science. A lot of the trips we took during the summer were to academic scientific conferences throughout the world. As I talk about in the preface of Closing the Innovation Gap, it wasn’t just that my parents were both academics, but both were Ph.D.s in electrical engineering — it was quite rare at the time for a woman to have a Ph.D. in electrical engineering. And so I just grew up in an environment where I was surrounded by academics and scientists.
The Mercatus Institute, “a university-based research center [that] works to advance knowledge about how markets work to improve our lives,” has a web page devoted to research on Hurricane Katrina. Questions explored by the Mercatus researchers include: How did New Orleans communities that have recovered since Katrina do so? What effect did social entrepreneurship have on their recovery? What kinds of government policies could facilitate a quicker recovery from future disasters? Among the experts featured are two CEE Guest Speakers, Emily Chamlee-Wright and Steven Horwitz.
Entrepreneurship is all about rethinking the old way of doing things, so let’s start off the New Year by reading about ten breakthrough ideas for 2010 at Harvard Business Review. Some of the interesting issues explored by the authors are: What truly motivates employees? Can we create a better model for the pharmaceutical business? How can we speed up the process by which innovative research makes it to the marketplace? And, what lessons can we learn about productivity from hackers?
The Institute for Justice has an inspiring series of five reports on the beneficial effects of entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurs themselves and on their communities. The reports also highlight the entrepreneurs’ struggles against unnecessary regulations. Says the author of one report: “If the impact of this one entrepreneur in a relatively small Mississippi community can be as wide and deep as documented in this report, imagine the transformation entire communities of unhampered entrepreneurs could create in America’s largest cities where hope and opportunity are in such great demand.”
