PROMOTING YOUTH CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIETY: THE POTENTIAL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

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PROMOTING YOUTH CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIETYTHE
POTENTIAL OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

• Richard M. Lerner
• Institute for Applied Research in Youth
  Development
• Tufts University

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ENTREPRENEURS

• See a pathway to success, when others may
  envision only, at best, the chance of breaking
  even
• Are inclined to move forward to create a new
  activity, entity, or organization, while others
  may remain wary, opt to do nothing, or to
  withdraw
• Are energized by the opportunity to work in the
  context of risk and find the challenge of
  uncertainty attractive, while others seek to find
  settings where the likelihood of success is
  maximized or, at least, the chances of failure
  are minimal
• Seek to free themselves of the pessimism of
  naysayers and the constraints of regulations that
  cast creativity and unconventionality as
  imprudent and socially disruptive
• Their actions constitute advocacy for individual
  freedom and, as such, serve as forces driving the
  maintenance and expansion of civil society
• Ultimately, may be vital contributors to the
  institutions of democracy

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HOW DO ENTREPRENEURS COME TO POSSESS SUCH
CHARACTERISTICS?

• THREE ANSWERS
• Entrepreneurs are born, not made
• Entrepreneurship Education (EE)
• Entrepreneurship develops (through a system of
  mutually influential individual ?? context
  relations)

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The Nature and Challenges of the Entrepreneurs
are born, not made Approach

• This approach is instantiated by the nativist,
  Personality Trait model of entrepreneurship.
• Traits are measured among adults and it is
  assumed these attributes are inborn (they do NOT
  need to develop therefore) and that they
  characterize the person across time and place
• However, nativist approaches are counterfactual
• There have been no tests of the life-span
  continuity-discontinuity of entrepreneurship
  traits
• Interrelations between traits and indicators of
  entrepreneurship are quite small (rs are
  typically lt .3)
• The predictive power of traits ONLY becomes
  greater when interactions with the context are
  taken into account!

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The Nature and Challenges of the EE Approach

• EE reflects a nurture conception of
  entrepreneurship
• EE is predicated on the assumption (shared with
  the developmental systems model) that behavior is
  relatively plastic and, because of plasticity,
  conditions can be found to optimize behavior
• However, little, if any, attention is paid to
  characteristics of the student, to maximizing
  goodness of fit between the developing student
  and the curriculum, or to student-curriculum
  interactions. Yet, such stage-environment fits
  may be crucial to the success of any EE model.
• There is little uniformity in EE models.
  However, this variation is not necessarily bad,
  in that such differences MAY be useful to
  maximize stage-environment fit among diverse
  youth
• However, there is no information about what
  facets of entrepreneurship should be the
  instructional target for what specific group of
  students, and with what sorts of features of
  curricular design

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The Nature and Challenges of the Developmental
Systems Approach

• This is a relational, dynamic systems approach
  The process of development involves the
  integration across time of mutually influential
  individual and ecological characteristics
• Individual ?? Context Relations are the focus of
  developmental analysis
• To date, there has been no adequate use made of
  this model
• This process has been invoked (but not actually
  studied) only insofar as adult changes in
  behaviors linked to business settings are
  concerned
• Therefore, we know nothing about
• The course in childhood and adolescence of
  within-individual changes, or the emergence of
  between-people differences, in interests and
  abilities regarding entrepreneurship
• The range of developmental trajectories (of
  intraindividual changes) that might exist across
  these earlier years of life
• How this diversity may differentiate youth who
  are on a course for successful entrepreneurship
  from those who are not on such a trajectory

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The Nature and Challenges of the Developmental
Systems Approach(Continued)

• Therefore, there has been no test of how, across
  the pre-adult portions of the life span,
• Characteristics of individuals (e.g., their
  cognitive, emotional, motivational, and
  behavioral attributes, including their
  articulation of positive purposes and their
  skills in pursuing these purposes)
• Combine with specific features of their contexts
  (e.g., their families, schools, or community
  experiences, or their experiences with
  historically new or innovative contextual
  settings, e.g., as may be represented by specific
  EE models)
• To create a developmental trajectory eventuating
  in successful entrepreneurship.

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CHALLENGES IN CONDUCTING RESEARCH ON THE
DEVELOPMENT OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP

• A Key Challenge Involves Defining
  Entrepreneurship
• Baum, Frese, and Baron (2007)
• There are hundreds of different definitions of
  entrepreneurship, but none specify when in life
  the entrepreneurial process begins and none are
  sufficiently precise as to point research to the
  particular participants to study, much less the
  specific constructs to operationalize in research
  predicated on the definition.

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The Shane and Venkataraman (2000) definition

• Entrepreneurship is
• a process that involves the discovery,
  evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities to
  introduce new products, services, processes, ways
  of organizing, or markets.
• Clearly, to show the behaviors pointed to in this
  definition, the individual must possess
  cognitive, emotional, and behavioral
  characteristics requite for discovering,
  evaluating, organizing, persuading, etc.
• Cognitions, emotions, and behaviors develop
  across life, but the definition does not suggest
  whether or when in life such development should
  be studied, much less what specific facets of
  these characteristics should be assessed

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A Useful Approach to Entrepreneurship Should
Answer the Following, Multi-Tiered Question

• What specific variables,
• Derived from what specific measures,
• Should be used with what specific group of
  participants (i.e., people having what specific
  set of age, sex, race, socioeconomic, religious,
  educational, family, cultural, etc.
  characteristics),
• Studied within what specific research design
  (i.e., to elucidate the development of
  entrepreneurship what type of longitudinal design
  should be use to assess developmental change),
• At what points in life,
• To assess what immediate and long-term
  developmental outcomes?

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The Current Status of Studies of Entrepreneurial
Development

• Most studies of entrepreneurship are
  cross-sectional or study only one age group
  (typically adults)
• There are no true studies of development of
  intraindividual change and of interindividual
  differences in intraindividual change
• There are multi-occasion studies (prediction
  analysis studies), but no studies of
  intraindividual change)
• The literature on entrepreneurship does not
  include any developmental (longitudinal,
  intraindividual change) studies explicitly
  designed to assess across the first two decades
  of life the individual and contextual bases of
  entrepreneurship

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The State of the Literature

• McClelland (1965) Study of n Achievement and
  later-life careers among 55 male Wesleyan College
  alumni
• Schiller Crewson (1997) Using NLSY data set,
  study of self-employment patterns of youth and
  assessment of later-life success in business
• Williams (2004) Using NLSY data set, assessed
  the effects in adulthood of youth self-employment
  
• Schmitt-Rodermund (2007) Using the Terman
  Longitudinal Study of gifted children, appraised
  variables in adolescence that may be linked to
  adult entrepreneurial activity

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Directions for Future Research

• To date, no data set embeds the study of
  entrepreneurial purposes and actions with a
  thorough assessment of the life-span antecedents
  of such functioning
• The research literature functions almost as if
  childhood and early adolescence were irrelevant
  to the development of entrepreneurship
• Therefore, we need to design a longitudinal study
  of entrepreneurial purpose and actions from
  childhood/adolescence forward
• For numerous methodological reasons, a cohort
  sequential longitudinal study, with staggered age
  levels at initial times of testing, is the type
  of longitudinal study that should be conducted
• Through such a study, we could ascertain what
  childhood and adolescent attributes, contextual
  conditions, and history of individual ?? context
  relations (including what EE experiences)
  eventuate during adulthood in a person becoming a
  successful entrepreneur

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Potential Contributions of a Cohort Sequential
Longitudinal Study of the Development of
Entrepreneurial Purpose and Actions

• The conceptual and methodological ideas we
  envision for enabling new scholarly information
  to be generated about the development of
  entrepreneurial purpose and effective actions
  will result in a new era in science and
  application (e.g., EE) pertinent to
  entrepreneurship.
• We will enter a scientific period in which the
  opportunities for entrepreneurship among all
  youth will be enhanced where the special talents
  of future entrepreneurs will be recognized and
  where these youth will be given the developmental
  resources necessary for them to thrive.