A curious finding on entrepreneurship and high-growth start-ups...

****

From an article by Richard Florida drawing on MIT research into US entrepreneurship and growth:

New startups are four times more likely than the average startup to grow if they are a corporation, two and a half times more likely if they have a short name, and five times more likely if they have trademarks. Furthermore, firms that apply for patents are 35 times more likely to grow. And, curiously, eponymously named firms are a whopping 70 percent less likely to grow.

I don't want to over-analyse this information - it could be reflective of the choices made by the better entrepreneurs (defined as those who succeed in scaling their business). Certainly the findings suggest that businesses approaching the task with a professional attitude - incorporation, trademarks, patents and so forth - are those more likely to succeed, which you think about it makes a lot of sense.

The rest of the article is an interesting one about the distribution of entrepreneurship - essentially the good stuff is concentrated in a few areas:

No surprise, entrepreneurial activity is highly clustered in the San Francisco Bay Area, Southern California, the Pacific Northwest, between New York and Boston, and in parts of Texas.

Interesting stuff for my fellow economic geography buffs.

....