| Course | BUS 484 Entrepreneurship |
|---|---|
| Module | Module 1 |
| Paper type | Entrepreneurship and economy paper |
| Length | About 1,293 words, 7 pages |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| School | Aspen University |
| Program | Business Administration |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for BUS 484 Module 1
Ten Years Later, About One in Three: What Entrepreneurs Add to the Economy and Why So Many New Businesses Close
Student Name
Business Administration Program, Aspen University
BUS 484: Entrepreneurship
Instructor Name
Month Day, Year
Ten Years Later, About One in Three: What Entrepreneurs Add to the Economy and Why So Many New Businesses Close
Every spring, someone in Fort Wayne, Indiana, signs a lease, orders equipment and opens a business that did not exist the year before. Most of these ventures are small, and many will be gone within a few years. Public talk about entrepreneurship tends to swing between celebration of the rare company that grows into a national brand and warnings about how many new businesses fail. Neither picture helps much on its own. This paper asks what entrepreneurs contribute to the economy and why so many of their ventures close, using three classic theories, federal research on firms and jobs, and three composite local founders whose stories put the patterns in human terms.
Defining the Entrepreneur
The word is used for everyone from a teenager selling lemonade to the founder of a global technology company, so a working definition matters. Shane and Venkataraman (2000) argued that the field should study how opportunities to create future goods and services are discovered, evaluated and exploited, and by whom. That definition shifts attention away from personality and toward a process: noticing a chance to serve customers, judging whether it is worth pursuing and assembling the resources to do so. It also makes room for founders who start modest businesses, since a new tax preparation office pursues an opportunity just as a new software firm does, even though the two differ in how much they change the market.
Three Ways of Seeing What Entrepreneurs Do
Schumpeter (1942) described capitalism as a process of industrial mutation in which new combinations, such as new products, new methods of production, new markets and new forms of organization, displace older ones. He called this creative destruction and placed the entrepreneur at its center. In his account, the founder disturbs an existing balance, and the economy grows because established firms are forced to adapt or disappear.
Kirzner (1973) offered a quieter picture. His entrepreneur is alert to opportunities that others have overlooked, such as a product that sells for less in one place than another or a need that no supplier is meeting. By acting on these gaps, the founder moves markets toward balance rather than away from it. Kirzner's founders need not invent anything; they need to notice.
Baumol (1990) asked a different question. He argued that the supply of enterprising people does not change much across societies, but the way their energy is used depends on the rules of the game. Where rewards favor lawsuits, lobbying for favors or capturing existing wealth, ambitious people pursue those activities, which he called unproductive. Where rules reward new products and better methods, the same people create wealth. His point turns entrepreneurship into a policy question as well as a personal one.
The Federal Evidence on Jobs
Public statements often credit small businesses with most new jobs. Haltiwanger et al. (2013), using Census Bureau data on the full population of U.S. firms, found that this claim mostly reflects age rather than size. Once firm age is taken into account, there is no systematic relationship between a firm's size and its growth. Startups and young firms contribute heavily to job creation, but they also show an up-or-out pattern: many close quickly, while a small number grow fast enough to more than make up for the jobs lost.
Decker et al. (2014) added a warning. Across several data sources, they found that the rate of business startups and the pace of job reallocation in the U.S. economy had fallen over recent decades, with the decline speeding up after 2000. The share of employment accounted for by young firms had dropped by almost 30 percent over the previous 30 years. If young firms drive a large part of growth, fewer of them is a concern for the whole economy, not only for would-be founders.
What Happens to a Year's New Businesses
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks every private establishment that opens in a given year. The table follows the 677,876 establishments that opened in the year ending March 2015 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], n.d.).
Two facts stand out. First, roughly one in five new establishments closed within a year, and only about one in three remained after a decade. Second, the survivors grew. Their average size rose from 4.4 to 11.7 employees, so that by 2025 the surviving third still employed more than nine tenths as many people as the full cohort had at opening (BLS, n.d.). That is the up-or-out pattern described by Haltiwanger et al. (2013), visible in a single year's openings. The most recent cohort shows the same early pattern: of 988,310 establishments that opened in the year ending March 2024, 77.9% were still operating a year later.
| Point in time | Establishments still open | Share surviving since opening | Average employees per survivor |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening year, March 2015 | 677,876 | 100.0% | 4.4 |
| One year later, March 2016 | 539,701 | 79.6% | 5.7 |
| Five years later, March 2020 | 340,281 | 50.2% | 8.8 |
| Ten years later, March 2025 | 235,071 | 34.7% | 11.7 |
| Employment of survivors, March 2025 | 2,759,210 jobs | Compared with 3,011,469 at opening | Not applicable |
Three Founders in One City
The theories become clearer when applied to particular ventures. The founders below are composites.
Denise Walsh, a former bookkeeper, opened a tax preparation and payroll office in a strip center on the city's south side. Nothing about her service was new; similar offices operate in every American city. Her venture was replicative, and in Kirzner's terms she was alert to a local gap: the nearest competing office had closed, and dozens of small contractors needed help with quarterly filings. Her business employs three people and has remained steady for six years.
Marcus Reed left a logistics company to build software that schedules grain trucks at rural elevators, cutting the hours drivers spend waiting in line at harvest. His product was a new combination of the kind Schumpeter described, and it took business from the paper sign-up sheets and phone calls elevators had used for decades. After a slow first two years, the company grew to 24 employees and now sells in four states.
Angela Torres opened a prepared-meal business that sold weekly dinners to busy families. Demand was real, but rising food costs and the price of a commercial kitchen lease consumed her margin, and she closed after 26 months. She later took a job with a regional grocer developing its prepared-food counter, using what she had learned.
What the Three Stories Show
Together the founders mirror the federal record. Walsh represents the large group of steady, small, replicative businesses that make up much of each cohort. Reed is the rarer high-growth young firm that accounts for a disproportionate share of new jobs. Torres is part of the majority of ventures that close, yet her closure was not a pure loss: her skills moved to another employer, and the space she leased was reused. In Schumpeter's account, this churn is how resources find more productive uses. Baumol's argument adds that all three were operating under rules that reward building something customers buy, which is why their energy went into productive ventures.
Conclusion
Entrepreneurs contribute to the economy in two ways at once. A minority of young firms grow quickly and create a large share of new jobs, while the much larger group of small founders fills local needs and keeps markets competitive. The cost of this contribution is a high closure rate: about two thirds of the establishments that opened in 2015 were gone by 2025. For a prospective founder, the lesson is neither to avoid the risk nor to ignore it, but to test an idea carefully before committing savings, which is the work of the modules that follow.
References
Baumol, W. J. (1990). Entrepreneurship: Productive, unproductive, and destructive. Journal of Political Economy, 98(5), 893-921. https://doi.org/10.1086/261712
Decker, R., Haltiwanger, J., Jarmin, R., & Miranda, J. (2014). The role of entrepreneurship in US job creation and economic dynamism. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 28(3), 3-24. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.28.3.3
Haltiwanger, J., Jarmin, R. S., & Miranda, J. (2013). Who creates jobs? Small versus large versus young. Review of Economics and Statistics, 95(2), 347-361. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00288
Kirzner, I. M. (1973). Competition and entrepreneurship. University of Chicago Press.
Schumpeter, J. A. (1942). Capitalism, socialism and democracy. Harper & Brothers.
Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25(1), 217-226. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2000.2791611
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (n.d.). Business employment dynamics: Survival of private sector establishments by opening year [Data table]. https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt
Reading the BUS 484 Module 1 assignment instructions
Aspen's catalog says BUS 484 covers the role of entrepreneurs in the global economy, how ventures come into being and what separates success from failure, so a first module paper usually asks students to explain that role with evidence. The exact Module 1 prompt sits in your classroom, and this example treats it as an analysis question. Begin by defining entrepreneurship in a way you can defend, since the word is used loosely. Present at least two theories of what entrepreneurs do and show that you understand how they differ. Bring in national data rather than relying on famous success stories, because the typical venture is small and short lived. Apply the theory to real or composite founders so the ideas meet practice. Finish with what the evidence means for someone thinking about starting a business, including the odds.
How the BUS 484 Module 1 example is put together
The paper starts with a definition taken from Shane and Venkataraman's account of the field, which treats entrepreneurship as the discovery and pursuit of opportunities. Schumpeter's picture of new combinations replacing old ones comes next, set against Kirzner's view of the alert founder who notices prices out of line. Baumol adds the point that the rules of the game decide whether effort creates wealth or only moves it around. Haltiwanger and colleagues' finding that firm age, not size, explains job creation leads into Decker and coauthors on the long decline in startup activity. A five-row table tracks the 2015 cohort of new establishments from opening to the tenth year. Three Fort Wayne founders then illustrate replication, innovation and a venture that closed, and the conclusion turns the numbers into practical advice.
Where the marks sit in the BUS 484 Module 1 rubric
Aspen's rubrics for introductory business papers generally reward a clear thesis, correct use of course concepts, credible evidence, sound application and clean APA style. This example spends most of its words on the last three. Each theory appears first in its author's terms and only then meets the case, which lets the grader see that Schumpeter and Kirzner describe different kinds of founders rather than the same one twice. Evidence comes from peer-reviewed economics and a federal statistical table, cited in the text and listed alphabetically, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics source written as a group author with its abbreviation. The table reports survival as both counts and rates, which lets the grader check the arithmetic. The application section ties each founder to one idea, and the conclusion answers the question the introduction posed instead of drifting into general praise.
Common BUS 484 Module 1 mistakes, and how to avoid them
A common problem in this module is a paper built entirely on famous founders. Household names are survivors, so they say little about the typical venture and nothing about the ones that closed. Use national data first and stories second. Another frequent slip is treating every small business owner as an innovator; many entrepreneurs copy an existing model in a new place, and the course expects you to tell the two apart. Cite the theorists themselves where possible rather than a summary website. Check that each statistic names its source, its year and what it counts, since establishments, firms and jobs are different units. Keep the tone analytical rather than inspirational. If the survival figures surprise you, say so and explain what they mean, which is stronger than leaving them out to keep the story upbeat.
Write yours, or have the desk draft it
This paper is an original model document written by our desk, not a submitted student paper and not an official Aspen University document. Read it for the moves, then write your own to the instructions in your classroom. If you want one built to your exact prompt and rubric, the first custom sample is free and arrives in 24 to 48 hours.
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BUS 484 Module 1 questions, answered
What does BUS 484 Module 1 usually ask for?
Aspen's BUS 484 begins with the role of entrepreneurs in the economy, so a first paper usually explains what entrepreneurs contribute and supports it with theory and evidence. Your classroom prompt sets the exact length and questions.
What is creative destruction?
Schumpeter's phrase for the way new products, methods and firms displace old ones, so that growth comes with the closing of businesses as well as the opening of new ones.
How many new businesses survive ten years?
In federal data on private establishments that opened in the year ending March 2015, about 79.6% were still open a year later, 50.2% after five years and 34.7% after ten.
Where can I find a free BUS 484 Module 1 sample paper?
The complete paper is above: three theories of entrepreneurship, Census research on young firms, a table following the 2015 cohort of new establishments for ten years, and three composite Fort Wayne founders.
Is a franchise owner an entrepreneur?
Most definitions say yes, because the owner takes the risk of starting a venture, but a franchise is usually replicative rather than innovative, which is a useful distinction in this course.