Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone. It requires certain personality traits, as Dr Na Zou identifies:

“In a way, being an entrepreneur is not only a rational calculation of cost and benefit: you also need to have a willingness to put in lots of effort. You need to have commitment towards learning and adaptation, and also willingness to engage in risk and uncertainty.”

But where do these traits come from? One suggestion is that we develop them as a result of the family environment in which we grow up.

Na, a member of the Centre for Research on Entrepreneurship and Innovation (CREI), highlights the existence of evidence from prior literature that demonstrates higher concentrations of entrepreneurs in certain regions – even when these areas have historically faced regimes such as communism that have sought to stifle individual business efforts. “It seems that there is something related to the entrepreneurial culture, which remains [despite external circumstances],” she explains.

She continues:

“It could be that there are entrepreneurial cultural values that are ‘sticky’, that are very resilient to institutional shocks. But it left me thinking: how? We must go deeper looking at individuals and families to see if there’s something going on at the more fine-grained level.”

If your parents or grandparents were entrepreneurs, then, are you predisposed to follow the same path? Na’s research suggests so.

Her study took nationally representative longitudinal survey data from rural China, covering over 18,000 adults born between 1940 and 1985. She compared their occupations with the class label assigned to their family during the 1947 land reform from rural China – which sorted the population into groups such as poor peasants, rich peasants, labourers and landlords. This designation continues to be passed on along the paternal line to the present day.

Rich peasants and landlords were “relatively more entrepreneurial” in this agricultural society, Na argues. Their descendants who came of age under Mao’s communist regime were, she found, 3% more likely than the general population to be entrepreneurs.

And those who came of age after his death? This cohort were 5% more likely to have founded their own business, with this latter increase reflecting a growing openness to capitalist activity within Chinese society.

“What we see is that in both of these generations – among individuals who were born in the same year and grew up in the same county – differences in family class background predict these varying likelihoods to become entrepreneurs when holding everything else constant,” she summarises.

The research also suggests that individuals from entrepreneurial families have stronger work ethics, more favourable learning attitudes and are more risk tolerant, compared with their peers from non-entrepreneurial families.

The fact that entrepreneurial traits appear to endure through generations, despite sociopolitical movements that aim to stamp them out, indicates that proximity to these ideas at an individual or household level can have a huge impact, explains Na.

“What I take away from this is that if we would like to encourage more entrepreneurship, then we really need to build more opportunities for people who aspire to be – or never thought about becoming – entrepreneurs to be exposed to these ideas through initiatives such as mentoring,” she asserts. “This would hopefully enable other people to pick up these values and follow their dreams.”