“Fewer entrepreneurs are entering, and those that enter are increasingly likely to fail and exit. The trend is shared among almost all industries and sectors,” Sasan Bakhtiari writes in a new data analysis for the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science. There is good news for researchers – just not much. Dr Bakhtiari says the “share of entrepreneurship” of professional, scientific and technical services increased by 1.6 per cent between 2009 and 2015.

So what is going on? Dr Bakhtiari points to five factors.

Resources Boom: good for mining entrepreneurs, but drained investment away from other industries

Cost of Capital: small companies pay more for more money

Globalisation: “as trade barriers disappear and global value chains become more of the norm, Australian firms feel added competitive pressure”

Demography: “Australia is becoming an older country and a decline in the number of people in the prime entrepreneurial age can have an adverse effect on the number of entering entrepreneurs.”

Monopolism: “an increasing concentration of economic activity in the hand of a few large firms corrodes the entrepreneurs’ ability to compete and to protect their rights. … Australian industries are getting more concentrated, there are reasons to believe that entrepreneurship should also fall.”

Dr Bakhtiari adds that entrepreneurs will always be game to go, which is good news, given “advances in automation and artificial intelligence making more and more occupations obsolete.”  “Subsistence entrepreneurship holds the key to autonomous job creations for the displaced workers,” he suggests.

Which does not sound quite like what universities investing in innovation and entrepreneurship programmes have in mind.