While American entrepreneurs get used to what seems like a necessary financial correction, the ambition to become an entrepreneur in the West more generally has fallen to roughly half that of those in the Global South, according to Amrop’s new survey data.  

Mikael Ahlstrom is a digital transformation consultant who sees Sweden’s journey in entrepreneurship, unlike its long history in the US, as having begun much more recently, in the dot com era.  

“When I started my career, an “entrepreneur”, at least in Sweden, was someone in construction, someone who built a road or a house. The idea of creating a job was not on the agenda. The companies were already built and they were big and they recruited a lot of people and you wanted a career within them. The dot com period was the starting point for a huge new wave of entrepreneurship”. 

Does he agree with the apparent observation in the Amrop data, that motivation to start a venture has gone down in the West?  

“Right now you see a shift towards the security of a pay cheque and a focus on life balance instead of striving towards developing your next innovation. Also the entrepreneur as a consultant has diminished - due to the global crisis large companies have been cutting down on consultancy.”  

“Society needs entrepreneurs, in as many sectors as possible, creating jobs. But if more and more of the top talents prefer to seek a safe, secure path in a steady job, then fewer jobs will of course be created and innovation will go down”, says Ahlstrom. 

The Saudi Triple Helix

The Saudi Arabian economy is for the most part concerned with oil. But with an involuntary disruption on the horizon as the world moves towards renewable energy, the country is attempting to create a new landscape of thousands of small companies to replace the former big one.  

“It might be an extreme example, but the Saudis have set out an agenda where a dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem is one of the key elements for its future development. This is what we call a triple helix - academia, large corporations and capital.” 

And this ecosystem on differing scales, Ahlstrom believes, is the way to foster enduring entrepreneurship everywhere.  

“What do entrepreneurs thrive on apart from capital? First of all, I would say it's a competence. So you need academia, and not just academia that knows a lot of the old stuff. You need academia that gives students the attitudes of exploration, curiosity, bravery, and the capabilities of collaboration.”  

Swedish Supermodel

Some countries are experiencing booms of entrepreneurial motivation in spite of scarce finance, and in the absence of massive disruption on the Saudi scale.  

Entrepreneurs in some Nordic states are driving a boom in tech and the life sciences. And here’s a surprise - they have a big advantage over their rivals around the world, in part, because of the rules and laws surrounding their intellectual property. 

Armando Cázares-Körner heads The Park in Stockholm, an organization which appears to turn scientists into entrepreneurs. Or as their literature puts it, is “On a mission to bring academia and industry closer together by facilitating networking and fostering collaboration.” He explains the phenomenon of the Teacher’s Exemption.  

“In Sweden, the people doing the research are the ones that own the intellectual property, not the professor and not the institution they work for. So if you have a nice idea, and you've tested it in the academic setting with publications, and you want to patent it, then you can do so without involving the university. This is true anywhere across academia, whether it's life sciences or deep tech or economics. Any new findings or results that you derive from your research, they're your own and the IP is yours.” 

Cázares-Körner believes this is helping to propel a new generation of entrepreneurs. Ownership is motivating.  

“There's a lot for you to gain, if you succeed in developing your ideas, as opposed to, for example, in the US and the UK where if you want to patent anything you need explicit consent from your university. And I think in the case of University College London, where I studied, you cannot commercialise without essentially buying off UCL. You can see how that discourages people from trying in business at all.”  

Back in the US, Sarah Smith and Kevin Long have one final, crucial piece of advice for startup entrepreneurs.  

“In Portland we are in a support group called “Starve-ups”. 

So called because it hurts so much to start a business that you sometimes feel starved to death. But the group saved their company.  

“There is no way as a company The Dyrt would still exist had we not been a part of that group. It was such a valuable group of people because it was made up of 10 companies a year from all different areas, tech startups, health, food, consumer business, B2B. Everyone would apply and 10 companies a year would be invited into this group. And it's just a founder to founder support network. And it's all off the record. So you can be like, hey, we're going to run out of money next week. We don't know how to pay our employees. What should we do? And everyone will spend an hour helping you figure out what to do. From the start I thought, this is the most honest meeting I've ever been to”, says Long.  

So perhaps there is a silver bullet for curing Western reluctance towards entrepreneurship - and it comes in the shape of a complex hive-mind of experience, support and relentless learning. This, you could argue, is the antidote to the drying up of cheap capital.  

“Over the years, people have introduced me to other entrepreneurs and founders to chat with, to help. If they're not in a network of entrepreneurs, I'm thinking to myself, that's not going to work. Luckily, those networks exist all throughout the world. You just have to be willing to go out and find them”, says Smith.