Colin Bell over at Winning Moves picks over this old chestnut in his latest post.
Should we throw our limited resources at businesses that we believe have high growth potential or should we just go for lots of start-ups knowing that a minority of them will experience high growth anyway?
The plain truth is that both are equally foolish policy goals.
We simply can’t pick winners/high growth businesses. So how do we know which to resource?
And as Drucker said ‘you can’t have the mountain top without the mountain’ . High growth businesses emerge from a strong and vibrant enterprise ecology. An ecology that is diverse, tightly knit and well connected (bridging and bonding, social and cultural capital).
Focus on building the mountain and the top will look after itself.
But please don’t build the mountain by rushing to increase the start up rate.
When we do this we just increase the failure rate too and that undermines aspiration and confidence. So start fewer businesses, but make sure they are good ones, team starts, well thought through and researched. Get survival rates into the 90%s after three years. Not just survival, but successful. Allow these small but significant success show the way to others.
So set up a broad enterprise ecology – lots of people with ideas and the confidence to act on them (this is not just about business but about social impact, culture, festivals, campaigning and so on) and build social networks, communities, that know how to support their members.
Invest your economic development budget in supporting people, who really are committed to making things better, and building communities. Smart, confident people in competent communities will not only give you the economic outputs that you require – but they might just give you something much more interesting as well.
I expect these ideas to be dismissed by those who have High Growth and Mass Start Up Programmes to sell, and by those running economic development teams who have for decades been buying these programmes and commissioning evaluations that say ‘much has been achieved but much remains to be done’.
But perhaps some will see that now is as good a time as any to try something new….