No. 1 June 2011
T
Faculty of Business Administration, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Center for Entrepreneurship
“
O INSPIRE A PASSION FOR ENTREPRENEURSHIP”
CUHK’s Center for Entrepreneurship Gaining
NEW GROUND
N
ot many would dispute that Hong Kong is a city where work and business are the driving factors and lifeblood of the society and that the buzzing enclave has a heritage of entrepreneurship. Therefore, it would be quite unexpected to discover that the percentage of individuals starting their own business in recent history is low. But that is exactly what was revealed after a study was conducted to investigate the current status of entrepreneurship in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, which compared how these two cities fared alongside other countries worldwide. The ensuing report, ‘Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2009 Hong Kong-Shenzhen’, showed that Hong Kong people nowadays are much less enthusiastic about starting their own business compared to people in China. Shenzhen has also declined in entrepreneurship after its rapid development. “In Hong Kong, most of the people, including students, are not completely aware of entrepreneurship or what it means,” said
Prof. Kevin Au, Associate Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship. “They talk about it but they do not really know what it is and many of the students who come here are looking to work in large corporations.”
generally, most of the people are not very interested to become an entrepreneur.” GEM is a research consortium of over 300 scholars from over 50 countries and produces the world’s most scalable
We wanted to learn more and promote entrepreneurship
in Hong Kong in order to motivate and encourage people to innovate and take risks. “Even their parents are hoping that they will work for large corporations,” continued Au. “If you have a kid and you have invested half a million dollars in their education and they tell you that they want to start their own company, you may think, ‘No, it’s too risky’. Whereas, if they tell you that they want to work for McKinsey or a large investment bank, the thinking is often, ‘Good for you’. That is the natural tendency and so
research report, providing information on the situation of entrepreneurship. Through comparison with the rest of the world, it studies and analyses the current status of entrepreneurship in Hong Kong and Shenzhen and the difficulties that people may encounter in the start-up of their own business. More than 4,000 Hong Kong and Shenzhen residents responded to telephone interviews in the 2009 study.