Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the rise of the entrepreneur was widely reported in the business press. New firms, led by previously unknown entrepreneurs like Michael Dell, Bill Gates, and Steve Case, came to dominate their respective industries, leading young people from all walks of life to want to start their own businesses instead of joining large companies. New magazines like Inc., Fast Company, and Entrepreneur emerged to educate budding moguls on how they could get into the entrepreneurship game. Entrepreneurship was “The New New Thing,” to borrow the title of Michael Lewis's popular study of the rise of Netscape (Lewis 2000).

As popular culture embraced the entrepreneur, economic development policy largely hewed to business as usual. Despite some rhetorical posturing about the “new economy,” neither entrepreneurs nor high-growth companies have received serious attention or funding from state and local policymakers. A 1998 survey found that entrepreneurial development programs accounted for less than 1 percent of the more than $2 billion in annual state economic development investments (National Association of State Development Agencies 1998). Given the growing importance of entrepreneurship and the clear bottom-line economic benefits generated by high-growth companies, this lack of interest is puzzling.

Fortunately the divide between business trends and the responses of economic development policymakers may be closing. Over the past two to three years, a boomlet of interest in public policy that supports entrepreneurship has developed.