Are big corporations loosing their appeal for young innovative talents?

I recently published my second book, a study of young Flemish entrepreneurs and what every business can learn from them. For obvious reasons the book will only appear in Dutch. As a futurist, I was particularly interested in what these young entrepreneurs had in common. After all, these youngsters will partially define how the business environment will look like five to ten years from now (‘if you want to know the future, look at your children’, remember?).

Did they have the same education? Nope. Did they have their parents as role models of entrepreneurship? Nope. Did they have some particular experience abroad? Nope.

Then I checked their professional experience, and it’s there that I found something quite remarkable.

Let me start with the couple of more experienced entrepreneurs that advised me while writing the book. What you see on the graph beneath is the number of years they spent as full-time employee, as entrepreneur or as a mixture of both, starting from the end of their studies:

This picture shouldn’t be too surprising. The ‘older’ generation of entrepreneurs started by building an experience of 8-12 years in a traditional company, and then have a radical break for one reason or another, to become full-time entrepreneurs.

Let’s compare this with the younger generation of entrepreneurs that I cover in the book. Strangely enough, I had to make a distinction between those that are older than 30 years, and those younger. Let’s start with those that are older than 30:

What we see is that these youngsters start with their own initiative much earlier than the more experienced entrepreneurs, but they do this in combination with a ‘traditional’ job of some kind. Perhaps they start to have a family and for that they’re more risk-averse.

But how different is this from the entrepreneurs younger than 30!

These youngsters start immediately with their own thing. Sometimes in combination with a ‘traditional’ job, which they leave very soon in order to build their own company!

There’s plenty of explanations to this, of course: entry-level for web startups is lower than ever; virtually everyone has access to the global market nowadays; there’s plenty of programs to stimulate entrepreneurship at high-school, etc.

An extra wildcard from my side, based on all the discussions I had with these young entrepreneurs: working within a big established firm has lost a bit of its sex appeal. There’s no glory anymore in building a career in a traditional company.

This obviously poses a serious threat to traditional companies. I’m not saying every youngster will build his startup instead of joining a company. What I’m saying is that the most brilliant ones, the most innovative ones, will not hesitate to do so –at least not as long as their older peers did. Mix this with the changing needs and wishes of Generation Y employees, and upcoming talent gap which we start to experience in some areas already, and you start to have a sense of the magnitude of the challenge.

There’s plenty of things companies can do in order to counter this trend. The most important one is to (re)introduce a spirit of entrepreneurship in the company. It’s easier said than done, so stay tuned on this blog for some advise on this.

(oh, and for my Flemish-speaking readers, the book is now available at my publisher Die Keure)