Small business

1.5 Monitoring the enterprise culture
Objective: To measure society’s capacity for enterprise and self-help, with the ability and knowledge to start
independent businesses as the core competence. 
Policy makers throughout the world have placed considerable emphasis on the development of
appropriate enterprise cultures in society. There have been many programmes, particularly in the field of
education, designed to stimulate entrepreneurial behaviour in youth. It is difficult to monitor the impact

---

of these other than by measuring coverage - counting the numbers of programmes offered, for example in
the school and college curriculums, and the numbers of students involved.  
The development of the enterprise culture in society as a whole can be measured by survey methods.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM – see Annex 2) survey has attempted to create an international
benchmark for this purpose focusing mainly on attitudes to and knowledge of starting a business. It now
operates in over twenty countries. It uses a combination of national opinion poll surveys and ‘Delphi’
(brainstorming with local experts) techniques. The European Union has also attempted to take ‘barometer’
measures of the culture and the health of the SME community (see Annex 9).