Graduate school of management (GSOM) SPbSU publish today the data of the Russian report of the project GEM (“Global entrepreneurship monitor”) for the year 2019. They show a sharp growth in entrepreneurial activity in 2019 in Russia and even sharper entrepreneurial intentions of the population. Within the GEM might have been able to fix the beginning of the active phase of formation of the business culture in Russia in moderately adverse environment in connection with the change of public sentiment, and under the influence of accumulated years of starting experience.GSOM, prepared jointly with Sberbank, a part of this ambitious project, publishes the Russian version of the report of the GEM. The GEM project was founded in 1999 by Babson College (USA) and London Business School (UK) as a comprehensive academic study of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, its national characteristics and attitude to it in society. Now it is the largest project in this sphere, Russia is involved in it since 2006.The importance of the GEM (the base of the project — detailed polls 2 thousand entrepreneurs, expert interviews and standardized analysis of the data) that Russia is one of the most significant economies in which the entrepreneurial culture is only being formed. Before 1991 the country at the level of ideology by the rigid antitreponemal culture, partly adopted by the company; involvement of population in entrepreneurship is by the standards of middle income countries low and in the public consciousness to self-employment business is heavily mythologized.The most important result of the GEM-2019 in the Russian part — confident and a very high growth entrepreneurial attitudes among the population and a high growth early-stage entrepreneurial activity: according to the criteria of the project, in Russia in 2019 10.2% of the economically active population can be attributed to early entrepreneurs and 5,1% — to the current. Similar dynamics in GEM was not observed, in fact, never. According to the project Manager in graduate school of management Olga verhovskoy, in 2019 the growth of entrepreneurial activity in Russia, a record. “For the year increased the number of those who believe that in their region there are ample opportunities to build your business. These changes are positive, but the figure is still quite low (only 30%) in order to talk about the impact of small business on the economy”,— said the expert. Especially strongly increased entrepreneurial intentions — they showed 14% of “reprepresenatives”. In terms of intention to create own business in 2019 Russia was comparable with Germany, Greece and the Netherlands.Part of the answer to the question “why it happens”, apparently, should be attributed to the accumulation of experience of interaction with entrepreneurs: the rating of the GEM in terms of “introducing entrepreneurs” of the Russian Federation has occupied 15-e a place from 50 �� at the level of Australia, Cyprus, USA, UAE. From Russia with “low start”: among the 50 countries participating in the project, she is at the 48th place according to the assessment of entrepreneurs, the conditions for new business (worse only in Belarus and Japan). In addition, most likely, the takeoff intentions caused financial stabilization 2015-2018. As the Director of the graduate school of management, Deputy Chairman of the VTB Board Olga Dergunova, the 2020 data will be particularly important: “it’s Interesting to see the results of the study of entrepreneurial activity after the pandemic — during past crises, the share of those who created new businesses in countries with a medium level of economic development not only did not decrease, but grew primarily due to an increase in those who were forced to become an entrepreneur in terms of unemployment.” In any case, in 2019 GEM captures a very rapid change in sentiment — a common opinion about Russia as a “non-country”, where the business culture is rather negative to be wrong. In 2019, 58 percent of respondents said GEM that is familiar to those who have created their own business, a decade ago the figure was 36%.GEM data for Russia gives important information about the condition of entrepreneurial culture. So, in 2019 decreased activity of existing women entrepreneurs, traditionally very high (men grown). GEM fixes some problems with entrepreneurship in cities with population 0.5–1 million people compared to the Metropolitan areas and smaller cities, a very low level of corporate entrepreneurship, the critical importance of commercial and physical infrastructure for entrepreneurship development in Russia in comparison with entry barriers, bureaucracy and gospolitiki (she’s the expert survey GEM assesses and as the strongest reason for the growth of entrepreneurship, and as a major impediment to it — and it’s very symptomatic). Finally, important for the Russian Federation is to assess GEM in the proportion of entrepreneurs engaged in the business continuing the family tradition: this is the motivation for 26.4% of men and 23.3% women. While early-stage entrepreneurial activity remains forced (no other choices income for life) for almost 80% of its participants.Dmitry Butrin
