This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: With more young Canadians considering self-employment amid a high youth unemployment rate, entrepreneurship programs are facing growing demand. Applications to Futurpreneur, the national organization that finances young Canadian entrepreneurs, rose 50% last quarter, compared with 15% growth a year earlier.
Yet most entrepreneurship support programs, including Futurpreneur's core startup program, begin at age 18 and expect applicants to arrive with a business idea already in hand. Both requirements reflect a common assumption: that the entrepreneurial impulse arrives in adulthood. Much research has made a similar assumption, looking for the social and professional influences that shape people after they enter university or the workforce.
We know, for example, that co-workers who have previously run a business can make people notice opportunities they might otherwise miss. MBA classmates can influence one another's judgments about which ideas are viable, and university peers who start businesses can make entrepreneurship seem less risky. But these influences may begin earlier than researchers and policymakers have assumed.
In a recent study, lead author Seok-Woo Kwon and colleagues found that the friends people make in high school may be associated with whether they become entrepreneurs decades later. To investigate this, the researchers followed two American cohorts born roughly four decades apart. One was a nationally representative group surveyed in the mid-1990s and followed into participants' late 30s.
The other was a Wisconsin cohort followed from 1957 through age 65. Across both groups, having a teenage friend who later became self-employed was associated with a person's own business ownership decades later. But not every entrepreneurial friend counted.
Adolescent friends who later built formal, incorporated companies—registered businesses with a legal identity separate from their owners—predicted a person's entry into both incorporated and unincorporated self-employment. By contrast, friends who simply worked for themselves informally, as solo contractors or freelancers, predicted nothing at all—not even entry into the same kind of informal work they were doing. This distinction is important because formal and informal self-employment are essentially different populations, running different kinds of ventures with different ambitions and earnings.
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