What comes to mind when you hear the word “entrepreneur?” For many, it might conjure images of what Dr. Leanne Hedberg calls entrepreneurial “unicorns” – people who start innovation-driven tech enterprises focused on profit, scale and growth. And while she says those businesses are important and good for the economy, they’re also in the minority.
In Canada, 99.2 per cent of businesses are small- and medium-sized enterprises – think daycares, restaurants and services businesses – the Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Inclusive Entrepreneurship told Research Recast(ed) host Kelsie Howlett. “They're the backbone of our economy. They employ the vast majority of Canada's labour force.”
But the country’s entrepreneurial ecosystems don’t necessarily reflect that. Most of the world, including Edmonton, shapes entrepreneurial supports around what Dr. Hedberg describes as the Silicon Valley idea of entrepreneurship – high-tech startups, venture capital and a culture that values risk-taking.
“My research aims to challenge and expand that narrow definition of entrepreneurship,” said Dr. Hedberg. “The complex social and environmental issues the world faces now show us that there are limits to growth and that a profit focus can have unintended consequences.”
As CRC and director of MacEwan’s Social Innovation Institute, Dr. Hedberg’s research program uses community-engaged scholarship to bring together academia, non-profit organizations and government in ways that support policy changes focused on social innovation and social entrepreneurship.
She hopes Edmonton will be a lighthouse for municipalities worldwide when it comes to supporting minority entrepreneurs, referred to as “missing entrepreneurs” by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The statistics on minority entrepreneurship are daunting, said Dr. Hedberg. Only 17 per cent of all Canadian businesses are women-owned, nine per cent are minority-owned and one per cent are Indigenous-owned.
“Our entrepreneurial ecosystems need to change,” she said. “Supporting minority entrepreneurs can only happen when we work collectively and cross-sectorally to shape policy. It begins with trust.”
For the past year and a half, Dr. Hedberg has been building that trust with cross-sector collaborations in the form of entrepreneurial roundtables.
“We’re focused on shaping a community solution to the problem and then creating a framework that can be used around the world,” explained Dr. Hedberg, who describes her role as bringing people together and facilitating the process. “Many of the problems society faces now are so complex that government can't tackle them alone, for-profits can’t tackle them alone and non-profits can’t tackle them alone. It will take different sectors coming together with their own lens, knowledge, tools and resources.”
She is buoyed by the collaborative culture she sees and looks forward to sharing her community-engaged work at the upcoming C2U Expo hosted by MacEwan.
For Dr. Hedberg, the impact of entrepreneurship extends far beyond business.
“I grew up in a very rural area, was pretty poor and always felt different. I understand entrepreneurship as a way out of poverty and never want to lose that feeling. It’s what drives my work.”