Does Creativity Aid or Curb Job Creation? Comparing Entrepreneurs in Creative and Other Industries

We study the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurs’ job creation. Though recent work has found creativity to be positively related to various entrepreneurial outcomes, we pose that creativity provides an impediment to job creation in particular. We provide one of the first large scale quantitative analyses of the interrelationship between creativity and entrepreneurship, using data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Comparing entrepreneurs in the creative industries with other entrepreneurs, we find that creativity acts as a strong hurdle to job creation. We also find that larger creative ventures and larger creative new venture teams have greater expectations for job creation than smaller creative ventures and teams. Team size plays a crucial role in affecting the creativity hurdle in particular, with creative trios outperforming all other teams yet with smaller or larger creative teams performing worse than their counterparts elsewhere. Overall, our findings thus imply that creativity...