Are you an entrepreneur or small business owner? Are you supporting entrepreneurs and small businesses?

According to this research from the Office of Advocacy, Small Business, there are some good reasons to patronize small businesses, and there may be more opportunity to in the coming years.

Small business owners are likely to be environmentally friendly, highly innovative, creative and well-educated and they create the majority of new jobs in the US each year.

NB: For research purposes, The Office of Advocacy, Small Business Administration (SBA), defines a small business as having fewer than 500 employees.

Statistics are from their website: http://www.sba.gov/advo .

1. More people in the US are becoming self-employed as contractors, freelancers or owners of microbusinesses, though conventional jobs still prevail.

Typically 7% in the US are self-employed. Ed Potter, President of the Employment Policy Foundation, predicts this could grow to as much as 10% in the next several years. This seemingly small percentage (10%) equates to millions of workers in a labor force of 146 million. [Source: Dallas Morning News, "Self-employed, freelance workers on the rise in new job market"]

2. Small businesses are environmentally friendly.

They are usually an active part of their community and also provide innovation. Economic research indicates small businesses innovate at twice the rate of large businesses, which often results in environmentally friendly products and technologies. (Source: Advocacy)

3. Small businesses are often clean businesses.

53% of the 22.9 million small businesses in the U.S. are home-based, and sales and service-oriented, which means they have very little potential for harming the environment.

4. Individuals with more education are more likely to become entrepreneurs, and they are also more likely to open a business employing more people.

5. Small firms represent 99.7% of all employer firms, and employ half of all private sector employees.

They employ 39% of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers and computer workers).

6. Small businesses generate 60-80% of net new jobs annually.

7. Small businesses create more than 50% of nonfarm, private gross domestic product (GDP).

8. There is a strong correlation between national economic growth and the level of national entrepreneurial activity in prior years, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM).

9. Two-thirds of college students intend to be entrepreneurs at some point in their careers.

10. Small businesses produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms.

These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited.