BizSugar.com › Global › Entrepreneurship out of Necessity

I have been spending most of this month traveling with Belmont students throughout Eastern Europe learning about entrepreneurship.

While in Latvia, we saw huge numbers of “accidental” entrepreneurs. These are people who had never intended to be entrepreneurs, but who became self-employed out of life circumstances and necessity.

These accidental entrepreneurs were people who had been previously employed as professionals and workers in government-supported jobs. Latvia had been a communist economy when it was under Soviet domination for several decades after World War II.

But when the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990, many Latvians were forced to find new ways to make a living as the economy shifted from a centrally controlled economy to a market-based economy. The jobs that had been “guaranteed” by their government were gone.