Entrepreneurship in Emerging Domestic Markets

As one examines worldwide economic growth over the past decade, it is clear that the U.S. economy has surpassed most of the industrialized world, both in its rate of growth and its ability to create wealth. Entrepreneurship is critical to this growth—entrepreneurs recognize the potential of new ideas, design applications, develop new products, and successfully bring products to market. They build companies and create jobs, generating new opportunities for wealth creation.


An often overlooked opportunity for entrepreneurship is the market segment known as emerging domestic markets (EDM). These low- to moderate-income communities, ethnic- and women-owned firms, and underinvested urban areas represent a rapidly growing component of the U.S. population. Smart investors seeking untapped opportunities are homing in on such markets. Visionary policy-makers recognize that given current demographic trends, America’s national economic health depends increasingly on the vitality of EDM businesses. At the same time, it is clear that fostering entrepreneurship in emerging domestic markets is challenging on many levels.


Entrepreneurship in Emerging Domestic Markets: Barriers and Innovation explores the key issues surrounding EDM entrepreneurship. Leading researchers and practitioners from the fields of finance, entrepreneurship, economics, and government delve into data to identify the significant stumbling blocks and pose workable solutions. With this volume, the editors aim to provide scholars, investors, policy-makers, advocates, and the business community a tool to help leverage the significant entrepreneurial resources in emerging domestic markets.


"What a refreshing and important volume! The reader will learn, contrary to some microcredit adherents, that not everyone is an entrepreneur, and that new businesses started by poor people fail at an exceptionally high rate. Net result: perhaps credit is overestimated as a solution to poverty. Instead, the poor need secure, well-paying jobs, which is what real entrepreneurs can provide. What does it take, and what has it taken in the past, to encourage these entrepreneurs? What has stymied their progress? Barth, Yago, and Zeidman have gathered a set of papers that you will want to read."

Gerard Caprio, Jr.
Professor, Economics Department and Chair
Center for Development Economics, Williams College


"This book advances our understanding of the complexity and intractability of economic development in emerging U.S. domestic markets. Its underlying thesis is both intuitively appealing and sustained by research reported here: entrepreneurs are most likely to be the transformational leaders in these markets. Thoughtful practitioners, government policy-makers, and academic researchers will find this volume to be a stimulus to sound reflection."

Robert F. Bruner
Dean and Charles C. Abbott Professor of Business Administration and Distinguished Professor of Business Administration, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia