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ACOA’s Entrepreneurship Strategy Wins International Acclaim
The Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a consortium of 24 industrialized nations, including Canada, has just published a bilingual book, The Implementation of an Entrepreneurship Development Strategy in Canada: The Case of the Atlantic Region , for distribution within its member states.
Authored by Lois Stevenson, this comprehensive study was originally presented to the OECD in Paris earlier this year by Ottawa VP Martin Abrams. ACOA is Canada’s representative this year on the OECD’s Territorial Development Committee.
By publishing the paper, the OECD implicitly recognizes that ACOA’s strategy which makes the promotion of entrepreneurship an explicit objective is a successful model to be studied by other countries. The booklet points out that ACOA’s efforts helped increase the total number of small firms in the region by 4.5 per cent between 1989 and 1993, compared with a national growth rate of only 0.1 per cent over the same period. The Agency’s activities also raised the intent to start a business within the next two years to 14 per cent in May 1995, from only seven per cent in 1991.
The basic strategy involves making more people aware of the rewards of running a business, provides more opportunities for small business training and counselling, improves the quality of information available to aspiring and existing entrepreneurs, and builds networks among business people and supports research about entrepreneurship. A particular goal is encouraging more young people to start businesses, and to a large extent is being accomplished by introducing entrepreneurship into the school curriculum across Atlantic Canada.
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