I haven't posted for quite a long time, but I do have the best excuses in the world. I was busy defending my dissertation and interviewing for jobs! I'm happy to say that I defended successfully and am now a Doctor of Philosophy and even more importantly, I've accepted a position as Chancellor's Fellow at the University of Edinburgh Business School. I'll be working on the development of entrepreneurial ecosystems and the relationship to firm strategy in Canada and the dusky moors and wrens of Scotland (I'm still developing my Scottish accent). And now that I'm an official Expert in Entrepreneurship, I'd like to say how much I agree with this article by Melba Kurman about the dark side of entrepreneurship policy. In our constant desire to boost technology entrepreneurship, we often forget that there's a large population of people who really can't benefit from this kind of entrepreneurship: people without the human capital to start or work in high-tech firms, poor people without the savings to endure the wait for revenues to start flowing in or the low pay and high insecurity of startups; single mothers unable to work the long hours these kinds of startups require.
More than that, I think we also may over estimate the actual economic development created by these kinds of firms. In the extreme, you have startups like Instagram, which only had 13 workers when it was acquired for a billion dollars. The value of internet companies is in their IP, not their capital or equipment. Even in the most fortuitous circumstances, when an internet startup gets all the VC investment and angels and invitations to TED talks, they may be worth a lot of money but employ very few people and therefore have limited economic spillovers to the community.
There are exceptions to this. Miovision in Waterloo has all the sparkle of a UW technology spinoff (which it is), but employs a lot of people in manufacturing and maintenance, as well as in engineering and development. However, companies like this don't fit well into the existing accelerator to incubator to VC pipeline many technology entrepreneurship programs are implicitly designed around.