With more young Canadians considering self-employment amid a high youth unemployment rate, entrepreneurship programs are facing growing demand. Applications to Futurpreneur, the national organization that finances young Canadian entrepreneurs, rose 50 per cent last quarter, compared with 15 per cent growth a year earlier.

Yet most entrepreneurship supportive programs, including Futurpreneur’s core startup program, begin at age 18 and expect applicants to arrive with a business idea already in hand. That may be too late.

Both requirements reflect a common assumption: that the entrepreneurial impulse arrives in adulthood. Much research has made a similar assumption, looking for the social and professional influences that shape people after they enter university or the workforce.

We know, for example, that co-workers who have previously run a business can make people notice opportunities they might otherwise miss. MBA classmates can influence one another’s judgments about which ideas are viable and university peers who start businesses can make entrepreneurship seem less risky.

But these influences may begin earlier than researchers and policymakers have assumed. In a recent study, lead author Seok-Woo Kwon and colleagues found that the friends people make in high school may be associated with whether they become entrepreneurs decades later.

The friends who make a difference

To investigate this, the researchers followed two American cohorts born roughly four decades apart. One was a nationally representative group surveyed in the mid-1990s and followed into participants’ late 30s. The other was a Wisconsin cohort followed from 1957 through age 65.

Across both groups, having a teenage friend who later became........

© The Conversation