Entrepreneurial Renewal in the Industrial City

Abstract

No business and no single industrial structure survive forever, but industrial cities need not decline with the industries on which they were built as long as new ventures emerge to take their place. Indeed, one can find examples of entrepreneurial renewal within large, mature firms, in the wake of plant closings, in poor communities bypassed by industrial development, and in government and the nonprofit sector. To appreciate the role entrepreneurial renewal might play in revitalization, it is important to understand that the entrepreneurial process is a long-term, human-centered practice of innovation that transcends industrial, sectoral, race, sex, and class lines. While any population group has its share of potential entrepreneurs, the extent to which they will emerge depends upon the availability of environmental support—cultural, financial, educational. With these supports the already significant impacts of entrepreneurial renewal can be increased.

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References

Again, it is important not to give excessive attention to the failure and closure rates. As David Birch has pointed out, the difference between growing and declining areas of this country is not the job loss rates, which are remarkably constant at about 8 percent a year, but rather the job creation and firm formation rates. David Birch , The Job Generation Process (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program on Neighborhood and Regional Change, 1979).

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9. Ibid. (1982), p. 69.

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