Education Matters—But Does Entrepreneurship Education? An interview with David Birch

For most entrepreneurship scholars and quite a few policy makers David Birch is well known, even though very few of today's scholars in the field have actually met him. His research in neighborhood and community development in the late seventies paved the way for the work of many of today's entrepreneurship scholars. In essence his findings were simple and easy to understand for policy makers: New and small businesses create the lion's share of new jobs. His finding became the foundation for government initiatives to support growing high-growth small firms—what Birch called “gazelles.” To be able to continue research and to build his database in order to analyze the development of businesses, Birch left MIT in 1983 to set up his own research company, Cognetics, Inc. Cognetics was subsequently sold to Publicis 3 years ago and became Arc Analytics. In 1996, David Birch was named the first recipient of the International Award for Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research.