Europa have just released the latest 2009 state of entrepreneurship survey – which interestingly shows that 45% of Europeans would like to be their own boss, if they could.
The EU survey suggests that entrepreneurs are held in lower regard in Europe than their contemporaries in the USA.
The survey highlights the differing attitudes in the US, Europe and Asia to entrepreneurship, but does show that the preference for self-employment remained stable across all regions.
Women seem to lag behind men and young people as a cohort expressing a preference for self employment.
Those surveyed shared their opinions of entrpreneurial individuals as either ‘job creators’ or as ‘exploiters’.
What was not a feature of the survey, to its detriment we think, is factoring in social entrepreneurship or the context of social enterprise as a vehicle for community business change.
Perhaps if more Europeans knew more about social enterprise or social entrepreneurs, or the impact the sector can have on communities – the range of relative levels of hesitancy to outright distrust of entrepreneurship expressed might be very different.
What do you think?
You can find the survey synopsis here.
The entry pages to the European Small Business Portal can be found here.