Your high school friends may shape whether you become an entrepreneur decades later

With more young Canadians considering self-employment amid a high youth unemployment rate , entrepreneurship programs are facing growing demand.

Applications to Futurpreneur, the national organization that finances young Canadian entrepreneurs, rose 50 per cent last quarter , compared with 15 per cent growth a year earlier.

Yet most entrepreneurship supportive programs, including Futurpreneur’s core startup program , begin at age 18 and expect applicants to arrive with a business idea already in hand.

That may be too late.

Both requirements reflect a common assumption: that the entrepreneurial impulse arrives in adulthood.

Much research has made a similar assumption, looking for the social and professional influences that shape people after they enter university or the workforce.

We know, for example, that co-workers who have previously run a business can make people notice opportunities they might otherwise miss .

MBA classmates can influence one another’s judgments about which ideas are viable and university peers who start businesses can make entrepreneurship seem less risky .

But these influences may begin earlier than researchers and policymakers have assumed.

In a recent study, lead author Seok-Woo Kwon and colleagues found that the friends people make in high school may be associated with whether they become entrepreneurs decades later.

The friends who make a difference To investigate this, the researchers followed two American cohorts born roughly four decades apart.

One was a nationally representative group surveyed in the mid-1990s and followed into participants’ late 30s .

The other was a Wisconsin cohort followed from 1957 through age 65 .

Across both groups, having a teenage friend who later became self-employed was associated with a person’s own business ownership decades later.