From Service to Enterprise: Understanding the Veteran Entrepreneurial Journey

Veteran entrepreneurship has received substantial policy and practitioner attention, yet scholarship remains comparatively limited and offers conflicting evidence regarding whether military service provides an entrepreneurial advantage. This roundtable brought together veteran entrepreneurs, scholars, program practitioners, and state-level workforce leadership to examine how military experience shapes entrepreneurial pathways and the conditions under which military-derived capacities translate into viable enterprises. The discussion challenges treatment of veterans as a homogeneous entrepreneurial category, emphasizing variation in military experience, life history, geography, sector, household resources, and entrepreneurial goals. Panelists identify leadership, planning, adaptability, risk assessment, resilience, and mission orientation as potentially valuable capacities while highlighting the need to translate these competencies into civilian business contexts through financial literacy, market knowledge, mentorship, and network development. Particular attention is given to individualized and peer-based entrepreneurship programming and to the role of bonding and bridging social capital in connecting veterans to broader entrepreneurial ecosystems. The discussion also complicates conventional measures of entrepreneurial success and failure, suggesting that autonomy, community contribution, social value, adaptation, and strategic pivoting may be important alongside profitability and venture survival. Collectively, the roundtable identifies opportunities to move veteran entrepreneurship scholarship beyond binary veteran–non-veteran comparisons and population-level demographic and economic outcomes. Longitudinal, case-study, and ethnographic approaches may provide greater insight into how military and life experiences interact with sector, place, household conditions, networks, and interventions to shape diverse veteran entrepreneurial pathways.