Here is an excerpt from an article written by Daniel Isenberg for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

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Would you allocate more of society’s resources to giving birth to more babies or to raising children well? Now, think about enterprise creation and the challenge of economic growth. Societies’ leaders need to rebalance entrepreneurship policy towards scale, not start.

In recent years, we have been witnessing a significant global shift in attitudes towards entrepreneurship in countries around the globe. This is reflected in the dramatic proliferation of start-up programs: Start-up America, Start-up Chile, Start-up Russia, Start-up Britain, Start-up Weekend, and dozens of others. “Start-up” has replaced “Silicon” as the reigning entrepreneurship buzzword: There is hardly a country or city that is lacking a start-up program.

Unfortunately, this is being guided almost exclusively by a narrow conception of entrepreneurship as consisting primarily in the starting-up of an enterprise. Equating entrepreneurship with start-up is not wrong; it is just very incomplete. It is also problematic because of two flawed implied messages: The first is that the most difficult and important task of the entrepreneur is launching his or her venture. The second is a notion we might call “the more the merrier” — i.e., the more start-ups, the more successful the program. Quantity of start implicitly trumps quality of scale.

Both of these messages are doubtful. If we look at entrepreneurship in terms of extraordinary value creation and capture, which I do, then it is clear that value can be created and captured in a large variety of ways, and there is no a priori reason to think doing this from scratch via a start-up is the only or even the best way. Extraordinary value creation may involve acquiring, re-purposing, spinning off, or recombining underutilized or undervalued assets, or what my Stanford colleague George Foster calls “re-starts.” The Kaspersky’s, for example, founded their leading anti-virus company by spinning it out from a struggling Russian institute they worked for. Over the past decade or so, search funds have become an effective vehicle for acquiring undervalued companies to infuse with capital, management and growth. Family businesses, large corporations, R&D centers and universities — any of these can be essential in creating or freeing up assets rich with untapped potential. And yet:

Extraordinary value creation cannot occur without growth, and entrepreneurial growth post start-up has numerous challenges which can be an order of magnitude more difficult than simply starting a venture. Growth entails developing a powerful sales and marketing machine, building an organization by hiring and managing diverse groups of people, and knowing how to acquire strategic inputs such as the right kinds of capital and suppliers. Growth requires amazing amounts of energy and dedication, not to mention smarts. Forward-looking policy, as well as culture and the private sector, must support all these skills and resources more than it does at present.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Daniel Isenberg is Professor of Entrepreneurship Practice, Babson Executive Education, and founding executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project. He is also the author of the book, Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value (July 2013).

To read my interview of him, please click here.