Cultural Diversity and Urban Innovativeness: Personal and Business Characteristics of Urban Migrant Entrepreneurs

This paper studies the driving forces for successful migrant entrepreneurship in Amsterdam. Three categories of migrants are investigated, viz. Moroccans, Surinamese, and Turks. Particular attention is paid to their personal and business characteristics. An extensive field survey was undertaken to identify the main background factors which influence the success and failure of migrant entrepreneurs. It turns out that personality, work discipline and business ambition are the critical success conditions for a good business performance of migrant entrepreneurs. In contrast to our assumption, migrant networks and support systems have no positive or negative influence on business performance.