The research isn't absolutely conclusive, but Matt Clancy -- who is an assistant teaching professor of economics at Iowa State -- makes an interesting case (over here) about entrepreneurship being mostly contagious.

The article cites a long list of studies that have more or less found that being around entrepreneurs can have a measurable positive effect on whether you yourself might also become one.

There is evidence to suggest that this is true whether you're a scientist working with someone who has previously commercialized a piece of research, a community with entrepreneurial neighbors, a student with an entrepreneurial mentor, or a child with parents who have started their own business(es).

According to one Swedish study, the children of entrepreneurs are about 12 percentage points more likely to start a business at some point in their life compared to people with non-entrepreneur parents.

But as I said at the beginning of this post, the research isn't entirely conclusive. Could a proclivity for risk and independence be instead genetic? Could it be that entrepreneur types simply seek out other entrepreneurs to hang out with? Perhaps these associations aren't causal. Maybe.

But my gut tells me that there has got to be some contagiousness. Here's an excerpt from Matt's article:

...being around someone who has done it plants the seed in your mind that it’s a possibility, something you really could do. For most of the studies, the population exposed to entrepreneurship is a population that wouldn’t normally consider it. For them, exposure has a measurable positive effect.

What this once again tells me is that there's immeasurable value in people clustering in cities, local communities, offices, coffee shops, and many other spaces. It's a hard (probably impossible) thing to replace. And it could be the difference between taking initiative and starting a business, and not doing that.

One of the reasons why I remain so bullish on cities is because we know that new ideas disproportionately come from cities (typically big and dense ones). Matt Clancy does an excellent job of explaining this in a recent post. In it, he cites a number of studies that suggest density is pretty good. It's good for not only increasing innovation, but also for increasing the diversity of innovation.

One of the studies found that, all else being equal, doubling the number of jobs per square mile resulted in 20% more patents per capita. Matt argues that the reason for this is that density allows us to meet and collaborate with new people. With this is mind, what do you think that working from home (which is the opposite of job density) might do to innovation/patents?

Another one of the studies that Matt cites in his article deals with the correlation between patents and street grids. Denser street networks seem to have a marginally positive relationship with innovation.

But Matt surmises that this may not be because it means we're all serendipitously bumping into each other all over the place; instead a denser street network is likely symptomatic of other things -- namely an increase in "third places." Because if you consider which census blocks have a concentration of restaurants, cafes, and bars, the number of patents then goes up meaningfully.

As further evidence of this, Matt cites a fascinating paper from 2019 which looked at the effects of early 20th century prohibition on patents. Turns out that this is a pretty good experiment, because you can examine the impacts of prohibition, as well as compare counties that were already dry (i.e. unaffected by prohibition) against counties that were wet prior to prohibition.

What the study found was that (1) prior to prohibition wet counties were producing more patents per capita (where they bigger and denser?) and (2) wet counties saw a meaningful drop in patents right after prohibition. Previously dry counties went unchanged in terms of innovation.

If you're skeptical of the relationship between bars and innovation, I would encourage you to check out Matt's full post. But know that there is overwhelming research to suggest that new ideas tend to flourish in the big and dense places that we call cities.