Written by Christine Hamilton-Pennell.
 
Entrepreneurs may be defined as individuals who perceive an opportunity and create and grow an organisation to pursue it. According to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, roughly one in ten people worldwide is engaged in early-stage entrepreneurial activity, which is defined as setting up a new business or serving as owner/manager of a business up to 3.5 years old. Most of these organisations are small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), yet their impact on the economy is significant. In the United States, for example, firms with fewer than 20 employees represent 97.5 percent of the total number of firms, account for half of U.S. non-farm real gross domestic product, and have generated 60 to 80 percent of the net new jobs over the past decade "The Small Business Economy", U.S. Small Business Administration, 2006: