In this adapted speech published in the Wall Street Journal, Michael Malone lays out a vision of entrepreneurial America in the 21st century better than we ever could:
The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.
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The most compelling statistic of all? Half of all new college graduates now believe that self-employment is more secure than a full-time job. Today, 80% of the colleges and universities in the U.S. now offer courses on entrepreneurship; 60% of Gen Y business owners consider themselves to be serial entrepreneurs, according to Inc. magazine. Tellingly, 18 to 24-year-olds are starting companies at a faster rate than 35 to 44-year-olds. And 70% of today's high schoolers intend to start their own companies, according to a Gallup poll.
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But liberty exacts its own demands. Entrepreneurial America is likely to become even more innovative than it is today. And that innovation is likely to spread across society, not just as products and inventions, but new ways of living and new types of organizations.
The economy will be much more volatile and much more competitive. In the continuous fervor to create new institutions, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain old ones. New political parties, new social groupings, thousands of new manias and movements and millions of new companies will pop up over the next few decades. Large corporations that don't figure out how to combine permanence with perpetual change will be swept away.
I am an entrepreneur, and teach entrepreneurship and social enterprise. I am delighted to see Michael Malone put numbers to what I’m seeing anecdotally on the campus of The New School and through my mentoring of young entrepreneurs at Columbia and NYU. What I’m also seeing among the Millennial generation (those 15-29) is social activism combining with entrepreneurship, which gives me enormous hope about solving the social ills of the world. Will companies and the way we work look different because of the way young people use social networks, virtual communities new technologies? Yes, I look forward to learning to adapt to this new future and seeing how we solve issues like poverty, global warming among others.
Posted by: Geri Stengel | May 27, 2008 at 04:49 PM