Education, Training and Networking for Entrepreneurship in ...

The ex-owner-managers are those answering
Yes to the following question,
Have you, in the past twelve months, shut down,
discontinued or quit a business you owned and
managed, any form of self-employed, or selling
goods or services to anyone (not counting a
busines that was sold)?
The investors are those answering Yes to the
following question,
Have you, in the past three years, personally
provided funds for a new business started by
someone else (excluding any purchases of
stocks or mutual funds)?
A person may of course play more than one of
the above six specialized roles.
Here we focus on the early phases of entrepreneurship.
We ignore discontinuations and investing
(Schøtt, 2008).
The level of each entrepreneurial activity in
Denmark in a year can be estimated by the
prevalence or rate of the so-identified entrepreneurs
in our surveyed sample of the adult population,
Table 3.1 (observations are weighted,
thereby enhancing validity). An entrepreneur
may of course be more than one specialized
kind of entrepreneur, and thus be included more
than once in the counts, so the total rate of entrepreneurship
of several kinds is somewhat
less than the sum of the rates of specialized
kinds of entrepreneurship.
The rate of prospective starters has apparently
been declining in recent years, which is quite
surprising considering the considerable efforts
to promote interest in entrepreneurship.
The rate of starters actively trying to start has
apparently been rather stable over recent years
with some fluctuations; that it has not increased
is also surprising considering the support.
The rate of operating new businesses has apparently
tended to increase in recent years,
which is consistent with our earlier findings,
also our counts from registration of new businesses
(Schøtt, 2006:62).
An overall measure of entrepreneurial activity
in the early phase is the so-called TEA-rate (Total
Entrepreneurial Activity, albeit this is less
than the totality) which is the rate of starters
and new-business owner-managers (and thus a
bit less than the sum of their two rates). This
TEArate correlates highly with other measures
of entrepreneurial activity (Schøtt 2005b). The
TEA-rate shows that entrepreneurship in the
early phase has increased slightly in recent
years, except perhaps in 2008.
Another measure of entrepreneurial activity is
the upstart-rate, the rate of new-business owner-managers
relative to all owner-managers,
i.e. the percentage of owner-managers who are
new. This rate is similar to the measure of entrepreneurial
activity based on registries, namely
20
Table 3.1
Rate of adults’ participation in entrepreneurial activities. Denmark. Annually 2002-2008
2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
Prospective starters Percent of adults 9.0% 7.3% 9.9% 9.0% 8.2% 7.7% 7.4 %
Starters Percent of adults 3.6% 3.0% 2.5% 2.4% 2.9% 2.3% 2.3 %
New-business
owner-managers Percent of adults 3.1% 3.3% 2.8% 2.4% 2.8% 3.1% 2.3 %
Starters and
new-business
owner-managers Percent of adults (TEA) 6.5% 5.9% 5.3% 4.8% 5.3% 5.4% 4.4 %
New-business
Percent of ownerowner-managers
managers 36% 37% 36% 34% 34% 34% 34 %