Babson College has posted their Global Entrepreneurship Monitor ("GEM") Reports for 2014 (one global, one for the U.S.), available here.

The reports are valuable resources and should be read in full, but below are a few, selected quotes from the executive summary of the US GEM Report.

• "The United States consistently exhibits among the highest entrepreneurship rates in the developed world. At 14% of the U.S. working age population, entrepreneurship levels edged upward in 2014 to reach the highest level in the 16 years GEM has assessed this activity. This represents approximately 24 million Americans starting or running new businesses. An additional 14 million people were estimated to be running established businesses."
• "36% of U.S. entrepreneurs operate in the business service sector, which is generally associated with knowledge and service-based businesses."
• "15% of entrepreneurs state that 25% or more of their customers come from outside the United States. This shows an increase over 11% reported in 2013, but it is still lower than 21% reported, on average, in the other innovation-driven economies."
• "29% of Americans personally know an entrepreneur; this measure has generally followed a downward path since 2001, when 43% indicated this affiliation."
• "Women’s entrepreneurship in the United States exhibits among the highest rates (11%) in the developed world."
• "The United States shows the highest rate of entrepreneurship among 55-64 year olds (11%) across the 29 developed economies surveyed by GEM in 2014."
• "20% of entrepreneurs aged 18-34 currently employ six or more people. 58% of 18-24 year olds and 46% of 25-34 year olds project six or more employees in five years. Among both younger age groups, 75% use the internet in their businesses."

At Belmont University, we have quite a number of entrepreneurial students, and I think the statistics show that entrepreneurship is a critical piece of our economy.

On the legal scholarship side, Gordon Smith (BYU Law) and others have been building the Law & Entrepreneurship field. The field continues to grow, and I hope to make it to the annual meeting of the Law and Entrepreneurship Association at some point soon.

On the legal education side, there is now a Law & Entrepreneurship LLM at Duke, and the number of related programs is growing. My colleague Mark Phillips is one of the academics advocating for the teaching of entrepreneurial skills to law students, and he shows that those entrepreneurial skills are useful to lawyers at law firms of all sizes.