Entrepreneurship was in vogue in the 1990s. Best-selling books and feature-length movies documented the trials and tribulations of trendy start-up companies, complete with foosball tables and macaws-in-residence. Twenty-somethings worth billions on paper partied with Hollywood stars and were feted by Washington pols. After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, turning a lot of that paper into confetti, the cultural fascination with entrepreneurship faded. The old brand names of corporate America, by and large, regained their places in the consciousness of consumers and investors. As 2001 closed, the autobiography of General Electric CEO Jack Welch topped business book buyers' Christmas lists; one can be confident that neither “foosball” nor “macaw” appears in the index of Jack: Straight from the Gut.

But appearances can be deceptive. The entrepreneurship fad rested on a foundation of fact. New companies have made significant contributions to economic growth in the past decade, both directly and by stimulating their more established competitors, as they indeed had in the decades before that. If the fad exaggerated these contributions, its fading should not obscure them entirely. Entrepreneurship is an economic phenomenon worthy of attention from those who worry about economic growth and particularly from those charged with sustaining that growth.

Such, in any case, is the premise of this volume. The contributors collectively assert that the level and quality of entrepreneurship make a difference in the economic vitality of communities, regions, industries, and the nation as a whole.