Page 45 - 1-Entrepreneurship and Local Economic Development by Norman Walzer (z-lib.org)

34 Brian Dabson

People with entrepreneurial characteristics are more likely to be able to
grasp these opportunities. Globalization places a high premium on ef-
fective regional competitiveness and the ability of regions to make full
use of all their assets. For rural areas, the identification of competitive
assets and the recognition of interrelationships with metropolitan cen-
ters in a regional context are of paramount importance.
• Some rural areas are better endowed than others in terms of sources of
innovation or climate for entrepreneurship, especially those with uni-
versities and research establishments and those with natural assets that
can be parlayed into entrepreneurship opportunities.

What policymakers still need is input from the research and evaluation
community in respect to the following assertions and emerging initiatives
and practices:

• Entrepreneurship yields equivalent or greater returns to public invest-
ment than more conventional economic development approaches
such as recruitment and investment in infrastructure.
• Regional frameworks that explore the connections between urban and
rural areas provide the necessary policy context for entrepreneurship
and economic development.
• With appropriate investments in leadership capacity, tools to identify
competitive advantage, and regional consensus building, governments,
academic institutions, the private sector, and nongovernmental orga-
nizations can build lasting regional collaborations.
• Given the dearth of financial and knowledge resources in many rural
areas, the focus should be on system-building to align available re-
sources and efforts to meet the differing needs and characteristics of
entrepreneurs.
• Incentives for collaboration and system-building to facilitate entrepre-
neurship development are more effective than categorical programs.
• The route to rural competitiveness is through the identification of as-
sets and that most, if not all, communities possess assets that entre-
preneurs can transform into economic opportunity. Creativity and in-
novation can be found and encouraged in all rural regions—even those
with few obvious endowments.

Entrepreneurship is by acclamation becoming the strategy of choice for a
growing number of regions and communities across rural America, but the
national, regional, and state policy contexts are still works in progress. Even
though the above assertions seem to have merit, one of the stumbling
blocks to their wider acceptance and action is the lack of hard evidence to
support them. To paraphrase David Hart (2003), analysts can and should