Enterprise and Small Business Principles
The development of technical entrepreneurship
Over the past 25 to 30 years many economies have experienced marked structural shifts. Developed, western economies have seen the decline of many traditional industrial sectors and a dramatic increase in the role played by services within the economy, with particular growth in the contribution of small firms to employment. While traditional manufacturing sectors have been changing fundamentally, expansion has occurred in technology-based fields that make an increasingly important economic contribution. The dramatic emergence and growth of high-technology-based areas in the US, such as Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Massachusetts, brought technical entrepreneurship under the spotlight some time ago in the US (see Chapter 5). However, it is only during the past 15-20 years that a burgeoning of technology-based entrepreneurial activity in Europe has occurred, exploiting existing and newly emerging technologies, bringing about a consequent growth in interest in the subject on the eastern side of the Atlantic. From an economic perspective local, regional and national governments and development agencies are focused on encouraging enterprise and are, understandably, eager to target their resources as effectively as possible into initiatives that will facilitate the emergence of new entrepreneurial business entities. Thus, they are keen to understand the entrepreneurial motives of founders and identify the needs of fledgling and established technology-based businesses to maximise economic growth and regeneration.
