It seemed so noble and exciting to develop a plan to bring the teaching of entrepreneurship into the Canadian education system, but when I introduced a plan to create the Canadian Centre for Entrepreneurial Studies in partnership with Ryerson (now a University), the reality was that I did not believe the Canadian Federation of Independent Business would ever be big enough to pay me a living wage. So, for two years, 1972 and 1973, I took $9,000 a year from each organization.
During my teaching years at Ryerson, I was the elected representative to the Advisory Council, a body like a university Senate, that makes all academic decisions. This gave me a conference travel budget and one of the key people I met was Dr. Al Shapiro, of Ohio State University, and a guru in the world of entrepreneurship. So,when I conceived the idea of the Centre, it was Al Shapiro that I consulted with, and he said he would give the new organization his full support.
Al had studied entrepreneurship in about a dozen nations, developed and underdeveloped. And instead of relying on national statistics on business start-ups and closures which were not widely available at the time, he asked people who they admired. This turned out to be a significant measure of the entrepreneurial culture of a tribe, region, nation or family.
For example, if he asked the Chinese of Malaysia who they admired, they would say family members who own their own businesses; whereas in an underdeveloped region in say the United States or Canada, people would say they admired professionals or government officials.
The new Centre had a Board made up of the Executive Committee of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, three senior executives from Ryerson and the Research Director.
Our first duty was to develop a body of knowledge on entrepreneurship that we could make available to Colleges across Canada and encourage them to add entrepreneurship to their curriculum.
Our next goal was to expedite three key projects a year. I pledged to raise $25,000 from key supporters to cover basic salaries, and Ryerson provided excellent facilities at no cost. We were off and running.
Our first contract was with the Atlantic Economic Council, and we organized a conference of business and government leaders from the four Atlantic provinces. The subject was the role of entrepreneurship in underdeveloped areas. We held the conference in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and the keynote speaker was Al Shapiro.
He made a convincing case that the current approach of transferring private sector branch plants to slow growth regions was not a self-sustaining strategy. Local people cannot identify with the Vice-Presidents who run and operate subsidiaries of US and Ontario companies.
Instead, he laid out a detailed strategy to promote local entrepreneurship and local success stories. When an unemployed worker can see someone they know doing well, they often recognize that they can be successful as well. Successful entrepreneurs and small businesses give birth to more entrepreneurship and new venture formation.
Any society dealing with fundamental change must embrace a strategy to make entrepreneurship a credible option for a larger portion of its population. Governments can provide important leadership in dealing with change, but it is only through entrepreneurship that societies accommodate the future.