Today we released the 2009 Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity.  This piece is important because it is the earliest indicator we have of how the composition of who is becoming an entrepreneur is changing.  Given the recession, the 2009 numbers are particularly of interest.  As a quick background, the Kauffman Index measures entrepreneurship as the percentage of the adult, non-business owner population that starts a business each month, thus the Kauffman Index captures all new business owners, including those who own incorporated or unincorporated businesses, and those who are employers or non-employers. 

You can find more of an overview of the findings on the main Kauffman website, but 2009 is notable in that it does show the highest index rating for the U.S. generally, African-Americans, and men.  But rather than regurgitate what we have released there, I wanted to post a few additional tables that I found very interesting showing the composition changes over time of who is becoming an entrepreneur.  So here Rob Fairlie (the study's author) and I have applied the Kauffman Index rates of entry for the different demographic groups to the Current Population Surveys weights for these populations over time.  This isn't information we focus on in the current report but I do think we might add it in next year as we only really went down this route in the last few days.

	Ages 20-34	Ages 35-44	Ages 45-54	Ages 55-64
1996	35%	27%	24%	14%
1997	35%	28%	21%	16%
1998	34%	29%	21%	16%
1999	33%	30%	22%	16%
2000	29%	27%	26%	18%
2001	30%	27%	25%	18%
2002	29%	28%	26%	17%
2003	26%	30%	25%	19%
2004	30%	26%	24%	21%
2005	31%	25%	23%	20%
2006	28%	25%	27%	20%
2007	28%	26%	27%	19%
2008	28%	25%	26%	21%
2009	25%	27%	26%	23%

	White	Black	Latino	Asian
1996	77%	9%	11%	4%
1997	77%	9%	11%	3%
1998	78%	8%	11%	4%
1999	75%	10%	11%	4%
2000	74%	11%	12%	3%
2001	73%	10%	13%	5%
2002	73%	11%	12%	4%
2003	70%	9%	16%	5%
2004	72%	9%	15%	5%
2005	71%	10%	14%	5%
2006	70%	10%	15%	5%
2007	67%	9%	18%	5%
2008	65%	8%	21%	6%
2009	66%	10%	19%	5%

	Native-Born	Immigrant
1996	86%	14%
1997	87%	13%
1998	86%	14%
1999	85%	15%
2000	84%	16%
2001	84%	16%
2002	82%	18%
2003	81%	19%
2004	79%	21%
2005	82%	18%
2006	80%	20%
2007	76%	24%
2008	74%	26%
2009	76%	24%

	Less than High School	High School Graduate	Some College	College Graduate
1996	17%	33%	27%	23%
1997	17%	31%	28%	24%
1998	15%	33%	26%	26%
1999	14%	33%	27%	27%
2000	16%	33%	28%	24%
2001	14%	30%	25%	31%
2002	14%	31%	25%	29%
2003	17%	29%	26%	28%
2004	14%	29%	27%	30%
2005	16%	29%	28%	28%
2006	14%	29%	28%	29%
2007	15%	28%	24%	32%
2008	16%	31%	24%	29%
2009	16%	31%	23%	30%

So, what we see here is that partly because of changing propensities to enter entrepreneurship (the Kauffman Index) and partly because of changing demographic patterns of the labor force that new entrepreneurs are getting older, more educated, less white and more likely to be immigrants.

Kauffman Index microdata for 2009 will be made available in the next couple of months.  Currently, microdata is available through the website through 2008. 

Back in July the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the U.S. Census Bureau hosted a two day seminar on turning statistics into knowledge.  The PowerPoints and speakers from the event are now available online for those wanting to explore data visualization or other aspects of making knowledge more approachable. 

From the Google Blog, it looks like they are launching into providing public data time series into their search/display functionality.  I can't say I am surprised, but they don't offer many details yet.

The U.S. Census Bureau and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are holding a seminar on July 15 and 16, 2009, on Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge.  While there isn't much detail available on their website yet, the event looks interesting enough for me to have added as a tentative on my calendar.  While some companies have jumped in to take previously unusable data and make it usable knowledge (Google comes to mind most prominently), much room remains for improvement and leverage of our existing knowledge.  Most of my focus in recent years has been on finding ways to leverage the data we have collected through additional research, but the next step of translation is perhaps more important and difficult to crack.