Understanding the Interactions among the Barriers to Entrepreneurship Using Interpretive Structural Modeling

Abstract

Entrepreneurship brings about economic innovation and job formation, and its improvement can well accountfor the unemployment crisis. However, many barriers either stop entrepreneurs from entering the market, or leadtheir business to failure after entering. These barriers have been sparsely and case dependently reported in theliterature, but, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have been yet designated to investigate the generalbarriers to entrepreneurship.This paper tries to bridge this gap by reviewing the most relevant and available literature to elicit the majorgeneral barriers to entrepreneurship. Eleven general barriers to entrepreneurship are identified and supported bythe related literature. Since these barriers are not independent and unconnected, but interrelated and interactive,understanding the interactions among them can help decision makers in determining appropriate overcomingmeasures. In order to model these interactions this paper utilizes interpretive structural modeling (ISM) whichhas shown to be an efficient approach for analyzing systematic interactions among barriers. We distinct barriersinto two groups of inside and outside barriers and with the support of the ISM-based model, we show that insidebarriers are dependent on outside barriers. Corrupted and unsupportive business environment then, shows to bethe major driving barrier to entrepreneurship.