News

Contributors to one of the world’s most sweeping studies of entrepreneurship have put a stake in the ground by incorporating solo businesses into their research on entrepreneurial ecosystems.

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2018/2019 Women’s Entrepreneurship Report, released earlier this month, includes a robust section on solo businesses run by both women and men. It analyzes data from 59 economies, where there are 231 million women starting or running new businesses.

The decision to include solopreneurs in the report is very significant, because both academic research and policymaking on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial ecosystems have historically focused on job creating firms and scalable startups. (This column is about one-person businesses, so I am focusing exclusively on that subject here, but there are many other interesting findings on women-owned businesses in the report).