Page 227 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

216 Don Macke

development process. They do not have an adequate commitment, invest-
ment, or strategy to even have an opportunity to succeed. Most rural com-
munities engaged in economic development continue to focus on natural
resource industry preservation, tourism, and/or business attraction.
Even though many rural communities embrace the idea of entrepreneur-
ship, very few have invested adequately in this approach. For many, entre-
preneurship initiatives fail because they exist in name only with current de-
velopment efforts simply repackaged and renamed as entrepreneurship. In
reality, these efforts come up short because they do not address the critical
elements necessary for success outlined earlier.

General versus Specific Support
A repetitive theme in this chapter is that entrepreneurial development re-
quires a customized approach. Many other efforts have realized limited suc-
cess because of the general approach they employ. Often, these programs
focus on addressing a narrow set of business inputs or skills such as capital
access or business training. While these resources are part of the overall
picture, they alone are rarely sufficient to create an entrepreneurial society
and/or economy capable of moving a community or region forward eco-
nomically. By contrast, more successful programs provide real-time and
specific help to meet the critical needs of specific entrepreneurs.

Under Resourced
As noted previously, successful entrepreneurial approaches are human
and capital resource intensive. Providing customized and sophisticated real-
time assistance to hundreds of entrepreneurs on an ongoing basis requires
staff, volunteers, and dollars. Many programs, even those with a great de-
sign, are less successful because of inadequate capitalization. Some areas,
however, have overcome this obstacle. For instance, in very rural Valley
County, Nebraska (pop. 4,500), entrepreneurial programs work in part be-
cause of a staff of three, dozens of dedicated volunteers, and more than one-
half million dollars in economic development investment. 5

Limited Staying Power
It is relatively easy to understand why efforts fail when they are short-
lived, and this is true of all development, but especially of entrepreneurship
programs. Since entrepreneurship is a human resource development ap-
proach, it requires consistent and long-term commitments. Even the most
respected programs such as Coastal Enterprises in Maine (www.ceimaine
.org) or the Delta Corporation (www.ecd.org) took years to refine their ap-