This ninth edition of Entrepreneurship in the Netherlands deals with high growth and the quality of entrepreneurship. In the 'Action Plan Entrepreneurs - Entrepreneurship policy in the Netherlands?', the Ministry of Economic Affairs describes its aim as not just to create more entrepreneurs, but also to improve the quality of entrepreneurship. Creating a successful enterprise requires a careful and well-researched approach combined with a detailed knowledge of the market. Many entrepreneurs in the Netherlands are still not fully exploiting the capacities of their businesses. This is often due to lack of preparation and insufficient knowledge.
In addition, the action plan stipulates that fast-growing companies are an important target group for Dutch entrepreneurship policy. The Netherlands is lagging behind the rest of Europe in terms of the share of such companies as a proportion of the business population. Therefore the Ministry tries to ensure that the Netherlands? share will match, by 2010, the average in the benchmark countries (i.e. the US, UK, Denmark, Belgium and Germany).