Interesting blog post on “public entrepreneurship” by MItchell Weiss with the Harvard Business Review. I would challenge Weiss’ assertion that public leaders can truly act as entrepreneurs. Weiss believes that public entrepreneurs face the same predicament as any other entrepreneur, mainly in that they face substantial risk in pursuing a new opportunity and that it is difficult to both reduce risk without resources and to attract resources while risk is high. “Public entrepreneurs” however, do not really face the same risks as an entrepreneur in the private sector. They are backed with government resources, which is limited only by the operating budget granted to the project. In how many different situations can we think of examples where the government has pushed forward with bad ideas irrespective of cost. In the private sector, these unsuccessful ideas would be failures once the entrepreneurs limited resources ran out. In this respect, I don’t believe “government entrepreneurs” face the same risk and resource constraints of entrepreneurs in the private sector.

Link: http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/03/government-entrepreneur-is-not-an-oxymoron/