Policy entrepreneurs

Policy entrepreneurs can be studied under two categories namely individual policy entrepreneurs and collective policy entrepreneurs. An individual policy entrepreneur can be found anywhere including governmental bureaucracies, political parties, expert communities and NGOs. The one common quality to all these individuals is the willingness to invest their time, knowledge, reputation and resources to positively promote a policy change. Sound networking skills are crucial to these individuals. Most of the policy entrepreneurs are known to demonstrate a great degree of perseverance. This is because they would have already worked with significant kinds of transitions in the past.

Though an overwhelming number of successful policy entrepreneurs have played their roles in promoting a policy change, experts within the bureaucracy and the scientific community have also played a great role in the past by successfully challenging the status quo. Often collective policy entrepreneurs groups consist of individuals representing government agencies at different levels. In this way, it becomes very easy for these groups to form a network among various levels of the decision makers, NGOs and research groups.

The majority of policy entrepreneurs are collective entrepreneurs. There are two advantages enjoyed by collective policy entrepreneurs. People in different positions may be able to innovate and work with new strategies to influence a policy change. Especially, experts working in the governmental research institutes and universities enjoy a greater possibility to promote and testify newer ideas and approaches. Secondly, different people might have different skill sets irrespective of their positions. Some people can easily move the masses with their appealing strategies and how they explain their vision to the media. Collective policy entrepreneurs can thus benefit from the talents inside their group.

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