High-Impact Entrepreneurship and Development: Shifts in Governance of Emerging Economies

It has been a long time since entrepreneurship is seen as a motor for economic development and, as such, entrepreneurship policies have been designed to build entrepreneurial ecosystems and boost attitudes towards entrepreneurship. In this article, I discuss recent practices of entrepreneurship-building in the Global South carried out by Endeavor, a nongovernmental organization headquartered in New York that seeks to promote entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Taking the efforts of the Brazilian affiliate as a qualitative case study, I argue that Endeavor is carrying out a form of entrepreneurship-building that entails the assemblage of networks to promote high-impact entrepreneurship and changes in governance of institutions such as the city, the academia, and culture. The networked efforts weaved and carried out by Endeavor are different from traditional top-down entrepreneurship policies and programs designed by governments and international financial institutions to foster small businesses and economic rationality. The data gathered in this investigation suggest the emergence of a type of socioeconomic development project that promotes and establishes an ecosystem appropriate to the founding of business enterprises. This type of development ultimately encompasses an indirect neoliberal societal reengineering and constitutes a specific economic subject, the homo auctus, whose rationality builds on and radicalizes the axioms of homo economicus.