Can your community build a successful economic development strategy based on entrepreneurship? There are no hard and fast rules for answering this question, but there are some important questions to ask yourselves. If your community is serious about entrepreneurship, it should first do some homework to determine if it can provide an entrepreneur-friendly environment or whether it needs to build that capacity.
Your community needs to ask some serious questions about its commitment to an entrepreneurship-based economic development strategy. These questions include:
1) Do we believe in our local businesses, and are we willing to help them become successful? How well have we supported our local businesses in the past?
2) Do we have people in the community who will champion these efforts and function as an entrepreneurship support team?
3) Are we willing and capable to foster new and diverse leadership to support these efforts?
4) Are we committed to change and innovation?
5) Are we willing to spend as much time and effort in supporting our local entrepreneurs as we are other economic development strategies (such as recruiting industries)?
6) Can we provide educational programs and technical assistance for our local entrepreneurs? Is the community willing and capable to invest actual dollars in these efforts?
7) Are we willing and capable to grow new entrepreneurial talent to sustain these efforts?
8) Do we have the human resources and physical infrastructure to provide these services in our community?
9) Do we have the financial resources to provide financial assistance and access to capital for new entrepreneurs?
10) Are we willing to partner with other communities to identify and provide the resources we need to be entrepreneurial?
If your community can honestly answer yes to at least seven of these 10 questions, it is probably ready to adopt an entrepreneurship-based economic development strategy. If it cannot (and most rural communities will not be able to answer yes to these questions initially), the community needs to build capacity before it moves forward with entrepreneurship. There are a number of local resources, including the Cooperative Extension Service in your state, that can help your community build capacity and become an entrepreneurial community.
To read more about entrepreneurial readiness, see:
What is an Entrepreneurial Community?
Measuring Entrepreneurship Efforts
RUPRI Center for Rural Entrepreneurship Readiness Factors tool
