When we talk about “perfectly ordinary entrepreneurship”, we mean the great entrepreneurial potential in our society, which exists far from start-ups and big corporations and already secures 38% of the jobs in German businesses.1 We see a future full of small and micro businesses, led by people who take responsibility, act under uncertainty, learn by doing and run them sustainably.
To make the most of that potential, we need far more stories about the many different routes into entrepreneurship and about all kinds of talent. People whose lives have demanded resilience, resourcefulness, strength and staying power, who learned them along the way and so bring the best personal starting point for becoming an entrepreneur. More people who build and steer ventures with creativity, curiosity and a will to shape things, sustainably and together.
For themselves and for others. You don’t learn to act entrepreneurially in a seminar. It comes from decisions that almost always affect other people too.
Putting something into the world that wasn’t there before. That’s the work, not the trappings.
Doing something you care about enough to stay with on the bad days.
An income that holds up is a goal in itself. Not a staging post on the way to something bigger.
Work you look forward to is one of the reasons to start at all.
Entrepreneurial capability starts from very different places. Here are four of them.
You know industries, failure modes and people that others still have to go looking for. Thirty years of working life is exactly what a company can be built on. What tends to be missing isn’t capability but an environment that treats starting a company at this stage as an obvious thing to do.
You may not have the network yet, but you have the time to make mistakes and learn from them. Getting started needs no finished idea, it needs responsibility large enough to grow into, and an environment that doesn’t treat a first failure as a verdict.
Acting entrepreneurially doesn’t necessarily mean resigning. Much of it can be practised inside the job you have: taking responsibility, carrying an idea against resistance, deciding on incomplete information. Anyone who does start something later then doesn’t start from a standstill.
You already carry the entrepreneurial risk, but often alone, and in a structure that only holds up for as long as you keep working in it. Going from your own contracts to your own company is a different step than leaving employment, and it needs different support.
A lot of us are working out how we want to live and work in the new normal, with all its uncertainty, its pace, its complexity and its contradictions. And how we might change it for the better ourselves.
Our education system, our labour market and our funding logic come from a time when most people were employees for life. That world is disappearing. We’re building the infrastructure that makes entrepreneurial capability a basic civic skill.
Precisely the tasks that training and degrees prepare people for are increasingly automatable.
What is missing is no longer skilled staff for existing organisations, but people who build new ones.
Large companies buy up the small ones and grow more efficient and more profitable, but not necessarily more innovative.
Between the start-up grant from the employment agency, a loan and large investments, there is no suitable funding in small and mid-sized amounts.
Biographies, experience and circumstances decide what any of us starts with. Experience is built in second careers, in caring for a family, after moving country, and in work that didn’t exist ten years ago. Little of that fits a CV, and a CV is what decides who gets in.