Endeavor

The intermediate explanations — those that do not focus or the economy in general, nor the individual entrepreneur — in turn, tend to focus on the analysis of specific markets and in its structures. The focuses, in general, are the busi- ness opportunity, the entry and exit barriers and structural incentives in general. This literature is greatly associated with the knowledge produced in business schools about business strategy. All perspectives are faced with a complex challenge: defining entrepreneurship. The alternatives most com - monly found in literature are those that, on one hand, equate entrepreneurship with self-employment and/ or small and medium businesses, in contrast to large corporations; or taking the performance of the over- all economy as a symptom of entrepreneurial activity. These are, in general, empirical alternatives to the ab- sence of regular or reliable measures on the number of entrepreneurs in the economy. The analytical differences between the various analytical perspectives on entrepreneurship result in a variety of questions, theoretical propositions and hypotheses about the causes and determinants of entrepreneurship. The ab - sence of theoretical and analytical units is, in a way, natural and necessary for the production of academic knowledge, but a real problem for policy makers and analysts. How to define and formalize in indicators the appropriate entre- preneurial performance for multiple perspectives? How to compare the variation in performance of the cities from explanations and causes for entrepreneurship of such a varied order? In this section, we briefly present the sources, academic and non-academic, from which the framework developed by Endeavor derives. In particular, this study benefits from the development, within the OECD during the 2000s, of a program aimed at standardization of entrepreneurial indica - tors — Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) — which brings together the plurality of perspectives on entrepre- neurship into analytical tools, with different ramifications, such as the recent ANDE project (OECD, 2007; ANDE, 2013). The first step of the debate provided by the OECD is to establish a broad definition, but relatively precise, of the elements of entrepreneurship. This same defini - tion is adopted by Endeavor Brazil and by the IBGE in the production of Entrepreneurship Statistics reports (Endeavor / IBGE, 2011). There are three elements: • Entrepreneurs: people who are necessarily business own- ers who seek to generate value through the creation or expansion of some economic activity, identifying and ex- ploiting new products, procedures and markets; • Entrepreneurial activity: the human entrepreneurial action in the pursuit of creating value through the cre- ation or expansion of economic activity, identifying new products, processes and markets; • Entrepreneurship: is the phenomenon associated with entrepreneurial activity. The plural definition of entrepreneurship, with its three el- ements, makes it impossible to adopt a single indicator to measure entrepreneurial performance. Endeavor Brazil's framework follows this definition, further on the study will show how entrepreneurial performance was made oper- ational. In short, following the same definition adopted by the OECD on "A Framework for Addressing and Measuring Entrepreneurship" (Ahmad & Hoffmann, 2007), adequate in- dicators were chosen to capture the variation in performance in different cities. In general, the indicators seek to measure any of the following dimensions: the overall performance of companies in the economy; the percentage of the population that chooses to open their own business; the creation of jobs and wealth in the economy by entrepreneurs, as well as the scheme proposed by Ahmad & Hofmann (2007). The next step in conceptualizing entrepreneurship and mea - suring performance consists of taking into consideration the heterogeneity of the explanations on the determinants of entrepreneurship in the same analytical tool, regardless of the analytical perspective — micro, macro or meso — of which are based on academic disciplines from which they originate. In the absence of analytical unit, some studies in the literature on entrepreneurship and public policy, in addition to developments produced by the OECD, provide good summaries of key factors (The Entrepreneurship Ecosystem, The Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project, Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index, among others). Lundström & Stevenson (2005), which produce a re- latively complete list of determinant factors of entre- preneurship, highlight variables distributed in three different levels: opportunities, motivation and skills. Factors relative to opportunities refer primarily to 88

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