Diasporic Entrepreneurship

The survey found that more than half (51.6 percent) of all businesses that responded to the 2007 Survey of Business Owners (SBO) were operated primarily from someone’s home in 2007. In addition, only 6.9 percent of these home-based businesses had $250,000 or more in receipts, while 57.1 percent of home-based businesses brought in less than $25,000. About 23.8 percent of employer respondent businesses and 62.9 percent of nonemployer respondent businesses were home-based. “Most businesses are started by people who dig into their own pockets for at least some of their start-up capital,” said Census Bureau Deputy Director Thomas Mesenbourg. “This is true for both firms with employees and those without them. Furthermore, more than one in five (20.8 percent) of respondent businesses used no start-up capital at all.”       

Written by the project's team of researchers based in prestigious business schools and universities on almost every continent, this important book begins the process of discovering why and how female driven business start-ups often seem to spontaneously emerge in adverse environments. Is it randomness, luck, or chance that determine success or failure, or vital critical forces and the inherent qualities of the women involved? The research emerging from the FIE project points to answers to questions about the integration of immigrant communities, their interaction with host economic and business environments, and the role of women in that interaction.

Credit: RenewOurEconomy.org Foreign-born entrepreneurship spurs job creation and small business revenue in the U.S., yet a new study indicates that immigrant start-ups are on the verge of decline for the first time in a decade.