I was browsing some Google data trends and stumbled across the "Global Entrepreneurship Monitor" dataset and the below charts. They show the self-reported perceived capabilities to start a company, and the intention to start a company in the next 3 years. The intention in the US to start a company has grown significantly over the last several years (almost doubling from the post-recession low in 2008) while the feeling of capability has remained more-or-less flat.
Perceived capabilities trend in US:
Entrepreneurial intention trend in US:
I'm not sure if you can really pin down hard conclusions from the above data but it points to two interesting threads.
I see entrepreneurship becoming a larger part of our overall economy over the next generation as the internet is making a lot of entrepreneurial activity fundamentally easier. Opening a web store lets you sell stuff to a potentially global audience, and can be done in about an hour by listing things on Ebay, creating a Squarespace page, or listing yourself on Etsy. Testing new ideas is getting simpler and cheaper as more parts of the application stack are 'servicified'. Better analytics and data tracking will give both entrepreneurs and financiers a clearer picture when ideas have traction, leading to lower overall risk in investing time and money (not just web page tracking like Google Analytics, but services like Mattermark that find information proactively). As these trends continue to solidify it'll continue pushing internet businesses into the mainstream and I expect 'entrepreneurial intention' to grow broadly.
One multiplier to this trend will be the creation of better tooling to increase the capabilities of people to get their ideas online. The key will be when high performers across industries start to think, "Hey! I can take this valuable thing I'm doing (or something like it) and pretty easily build it online and start selling it. I have the skills to do this and can do it with little up front risk and cost." Better tooling that lowers the barrier to programming in general is coming and will have a big impact on this entrepreneurship trend. Products like Prelang (rails generation engine), Stamplay (a simple backend creator to sit on to of custom frontend), or Eve (making programming more intuitive and human friendly) are leading this path and I expect to have a meaningful impact on the 'perceived capabilities' trend. A breakthrough will come when any computational idea can be brought online by a novice relatively easily (vs the solutions that exist today, which are templatized around pre-defined use cases).
I see the overhead required to start a company as accelerating downward. It's fundamentally easier today to start a high-impact company than it was in 1995, and I think we will see in a generation it's going to become fundamentally easier again. I'll be excited to see how entrepreneurial intention shifts over time, if perceived capabilities is a leading indicator for a shift, and how the tooling on the horizon impacts everything.