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May 19, 2008

Entrepreneurship as the next American frontier

An interesting essay by Michael Malone in today's Wall Street Journal (The Next American Frontier):

The entire world seems to be heading toward points of inflection. The developing world is embarking on the digital age. The developed world is entering the Internet era. And the United States, once again at the vanguard, is on the verge of becoming the world's first Entrepreneurial Nation.

At the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper to the American Historical Association – the most famous ever by an American historian. In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," he noted that, according to the most recent U.S. census, so much of the nation had been settled that there was no longer an identifiable western migration. The very notion of a "frontier" was obsolete.

For three centuries the frontier had defined us, tantalized us with the perpetual chance to "light out for the territories" and start our lives over. It was the foundation of those very American notions of "federalism" and "rugged individualism." But Americans had crossed an invisible line in history, entering a new world with a new set of rules. What Turner couldn't guess was that the unexplored prairie would become the uninvented new product, the unexploited new market and the untried new business plan.

Malone highlights a number of changes taking place in the I-Cubed Economy, such as more innovation, more technology, more start-ups and more networked production. Not sure all this adds up to an "entrepreneurial" nation. But it does, as we have argued in this blog, mean major shifts. As Malone says:

The economy will be much more volatile and much more competitive. In the continuous fervor to create new institutions, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain old ones. New political parties, new social groupings, thousands of new manias and movements and millions of new companies will pop up over the next few decades. Large corporations that don't figure out how to combine permanence with perpetual change will be swept away.

But, that could be said for a number of eras in history - including the relatively short period of American history. Things change and things remain the same. It will be interesting to see what part of the "permanence" remains as part of this latest upheaval.

Posted by Ken Jarboe at May 19, 2008 12:00 PM

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