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Entrepreneurial ability is widely regarded as a key factor for success in business, and the entrepreneur is the key mythic actor in the Schumpeterian account of the economic system. Entrepreneurship is now increasingly taught in business schools, within companies and in schools. Entrepreneurship instruction is now offered to young children, in general university and college courses and even more widely than that. Some writers have noted that innovation policy is moving its emphasis away from the support of SMEs towards the support of entrepreneurship (Henrekson and Stenkula, 2009), a development that Cox and Rigby have termed ‘the entrepreneurial turn’(Cox and Rigby, 2012).

The study of initiatives to promote entrepreneurship generally raises some interesting issues of public policy that might be regarded as technical in scope. We deal with these at some length in this chapter, where they are supported …