At the start of this decade, new business starts in the U.S. and in countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom hit 15-year lows according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Over the same period, public and private sectors have increasingly invested resources to help educate, connect, and ensure capital access for new and growth-oriented businesses. In addition to government-funded business assistance (e.g., Small Business Development Centers in the U.S.), entrepreneur service providers have grown to include accelerators, crowd-funded venture capital, university-sponsored entrepreneurship curriculum, bank-supported industry clusters, and more.

With a diverse array of private sector resources available in the U.S. and other developed countries, it is important to ask what the appropriate role of government is in efficiently generating more opportunities in the current entrepreneurial resource market. For example, private sector accelerators have emerged to move promising proofs of concept through the startup stage. Conversely, government-supported industry clusters have emerged in economically distressed metropolitan areas to mimic private sector success in places like Silicon Valley.

This paper applies two theoretical lenses to inform the appropriate role of government in entrepreneur policy: business life cycle stages from management theory and market failures from classical economics. With a large and diverse sector of entrepreneur resources, the U.S. offers a unique testing ground for understanding efficient and inefficient interventions and deriving lessons learned for other countries and contexts. First, the paper outlines common challenges at each stage of the business life cycle. Second, it applies the lens of market failures to hypothesize which stages are less likely to be targeted by the private sector and would require public intervention. Third, it identifies the evolution of public and private sector entrepreneur resources and programs in the U.S. that have operated to serve each stage over the past decade. Importantly, the analysis will be used to inform the stages in which service gaps exist and what innovative policies might increase entrepreneur opportunity at that stage.

India’s National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship (2015): An Ontological Assessment

India has formulated a National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship in 2015. (Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, 2015) Despite voluminous research on the subject, the approach to skill development and entrepreneurship is fragmented. There is no unified framework to address the problem systematically and systemically. The paper presents: (a) an ontological framework for national skill development and entrepreneurship; (b) the results of mapping India’s policy document on the topic onto the framework, and (c) the implications of the relative emphases on various elements highlighted by the mapping.

The method of construction of the ontology and mapping the policy is like that used to study national healthcare, educational, and heritage and antiquities policies. (Dai, Deng, Ramaprasad, & Syn, 2016; Ramaprasad, Dixit, Rawat, Swati, & Acharya, 2016; Ramaprasad, Singai, Hasan, Syn, & Thirumalai, 2016; Ramaprasad, Win, Syn, Beydoun, & Dawson, 2016) It is based on the concept of ontological meta-analysis and synthesis described by Ramaprasad and Syn (2015).

The preliminary results show that India’s policy seeks to create unbridled skill development and entrepreneurship through generative and catalytic policies, with no restrictions and prohibitions. The policy is to be implemented through the agency of the government, industry, and academia – with the government having a dominant role. NGOs and other external partners have very little role. A variety of policy instruments will be employed – dominantly educational, informational, technological, economic, and fiscal. The policies are targeted primarily at individuals – both youth and adults. However, attention is given to communities too. While skill development is emphasized more, entrepreneurship is given significant attention.

The policy is asymmetric – focusing only on the generative and catalytic and not on the restrictive and prohibitive effects. It is also imbalanced in the role of the agents, especially industry and academia. Overall, the coverage of the policy is broad and comprehensive. Ongoing assessment of the outcomes using the ontological framework can help make course corrections. The framework can be generalized and applied to other countries and contexts for a comparative analysis.

Dai, G., Deng, F., Ramaprasad, A., & Syn, T. (2016). China’s National Health Policies: An Ontological Analysis. Online Journal of Public Health Informatics, 8(3), e196. doi:10.5210/ojphi.v5i3.4933

Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship. (2015). National Policy for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship.  Retrieved from www.skilldevelopment.gov.in on July 28, 2016.

Ramaprasad, A., Dixit, C., Rawat, P., Swati, & Acharya, V. (2016). Leapfrogging India’s Antiquated Antiquities Laws: A Digital Strategy Proceedings of International Conference on Culture & Computer Science. Namibia.

Ramaprasad, A., Singai, C. B., Hasan, T., Syn, T., & Thirumalai, M. (2016). India’s National Higher Education Policies since Independence: An Ontological Analysis. Journal of Educational Planning and Administration, 30(1), 5-24.

Ramaprasad, A., & Syn, T. (2015). Ontological Meta-Analysis and Synthesis. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 37, 138-153.

Ramaprasad, A., Win, K. T., Syn, T., Beydoun, G., & Dawson, L. (2016). Australia’s National Health Programs: An Ontological Mapping. Australasian Journal of Information Systems, 20, 1-21. doi:10.3127/ajis.v20i0.1335

This paper explores the impact of the governance indices on the development of entrepreneurship in the context of ASEAN+3 countries including China, Japan and South Korea. These are the three important partners to South East Asian nations in wide range of development aspects. With the use of World Bank’s data set on the World Governance Indices and Entrepreneurship known as Doing Business, natural logarithm regression analysis was adopted to figure out the extent to which governance would exert its impact on the entrepreneurship development in the member countries of ASEAN as well as China, Japan and South Korea. On the basis of the study findings, conclusions and recommendations were to be drawn for policy modernization in the ASEAN+3 countries. This research found a diverse impact of governance on the constraints for entrepreneurship, thereby contributing a better knowledge to explain the governance-entrepreneurship nexus in the ASEAN Plus Three context.

The study focuses on the causal relationship domestic employment and tourist arrivals, exchange rate, capital formation, and economic growth in the Philippines. The data were collected from the World Travel Tourism Council and the Philippine Statistics Authority covering more than three (3) decades from 1980 to 2014. The hypotheses were tested using Johansen cointegration test and Granger Causality test. The study found that there is long run relationship between domestic employment and its predictors. At the same time unidirectional causality running from domestic employment to as well as from domestic employment to capital formation instead of the other way around. Since tourism generates foreign exchange revenues and jobs, it is recommended that the government invest more heavily on tourism-related infrastructures.

This paper aims at studying local social, moral, traditional, cultural and sustainability aspects of entrepreneurship education in growing the next generation of entrepreneurs in the Arabian Gulf region, more specifically, the State of Qatar. More specifically, we intend to analyze the effectiveness of existing entrepreneurship education in Qatar in comparative perspective in offering solutions to local realities. A crucial step is to identify the gaps in the existing entrepreneurial activities and education efforts particularly addressing the need for immediate and medium-term impacts by answering if there is necessary focus and strategy for building home grown entrepreneurs. The study aspires to draw localized understandings of entrepreneurship and its education in contrast to “often emulated” Western models.