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Couch Potato vs. Entrepreneur?

Too much television is supposed to be bad for our kids, our brains, our morals, as well as our waste lines? But what about for entrepreneurship?

While doing research on intellectual property this week, I came across a paper by economists Andrew Burke, University of Cranfield in the United Kingdom and the Max Plank Institute of Economics in Germany, and Stuart Fraser, University of Warwick in the U.K., titled “The Impact of Intellectual Property Rights on Self-Employed Entrepreneurship: An International Analysis.”

Amidst the analysis on IP and the self-employed, I found the following finding/observation:

“We also observe that high consumption of media related products such as computers, TV and cable TV … having a negative effect on self-employed enterprise activity. We think this is possibly because they may cause an increased preference for leisure over enterprise activity.”

Interesting thought. Does too much “Desperate Housewives,” “24,” and “Oprah,” not to mention cruising the Internet, mean less entrepreneurship? Are we less entrepreneurial and more couch potato?

Raymond J. Keating

Chief Economist
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council
May 19, 2006

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