Zoltan Acs has an interesting report on global entrepreneurship which finds Tokyo as the least entrepreneurial city of any his team measured. What are we to make of this? When I go to Tokyo I am amazed at the creativity. A walk through Harajuku, Omote-sando, Ginza, Kichijoji, or any number of other neighborhoods scream creativity to me. In Kyoto we find Nintendo, Kyocera, Wacoal, and many other firms that are global-class innovators. Some of the new movies coming out of Japan are beautifully shot and fascinating studies of the human condition, as “creative” as anything coming out of Hollywood. Shifting frames, Japanese automobiles, machine tools, and various other manufactures are global-class.
This suggests a question that is worth thinking about. Namely, what is the relationship between entrepreneurship and creativity? We might accept that entrepreneurship is creative, but is the opposite true? Is a non-entrepreneurial society not creative? Or, to go even further, this obviously rhetorical question, are non-entrepreneurial societies not prosperous? What does the community think?