Professor Muntean Recommends Focus on Entrepreneurs as opposed to Buying Low Skill jobs like Call Centers and Big Box Retail
April 4, 2011
News Release
Rather than chase after mature and declining industries through traditional strategies, Indiana should focus on maximizing the contributions of small, fast-growing and relatively young businesses, says, Susan Clark Muntean, a Ball State management professor who teaches in the university’s nationally recognized entrepreneurship program.
“Scholars, public officials, successful entrepreneurs and financiers must come together to rapidly devise and implement effective strategies to take Indiana from its agrarian and industrial past to its entrepreneurial and globally competitive future,” she says. “Empirical research strongly suggests that the old economic models and economic development strategies are not the answer. We need to question the wisdom of chasing after mature and declining industries through traditional strategies, which often represent a race to the bottom among states that give away the store in the form of foregone tax revenues in order to secure visible ‘wins.'”
These short-sighted strategies include temporarily delaying a plant’s closure or claiming large job creation numbers at low-skilled, labor-intensive call centers, distribution centers, service providers and big-box retail shops, says Mantean, who addressed members of the Indiana legislature twice this year on the issue.
According to the Statistics of U.S. Businesses, about 90 percent of employers nationally have fewer than 20 employees. In 2007, 85 percent of all Indiana businesses were micro businesses (fewer than 20 employees) and employed approximately one out of every five workers in the state.
Muntean argues that stimulating intelligent risk taking, creativity and innovation is good public policy.
“A failed start-up is not a net loss to society; those involved with the start-up venture, including the founders, venture capitalists, lenders and other competing businesses learn from attempts to launch a new technology or take a new idea to market. Later attempts by serial entrepreneurs may just launch the next Google, Facebook, Intel or Microsoft, which would be a boon to the Indiana economy for years to come.”
Source: Ball State University
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