British enterprise culture has been getting a bad rap of late, but if you take a step backwards for a moment you might just conclude that those starting and growing businesses in the UK have never had it so good.

Admittedly, finding cash to fund deals in the current environment will be tough and Alistair Darling’s controversial changes to CGT were a bitter pill from a Government that claims to encourage entrepreneurship. Yet the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) will tell you that the UK has the lowest barriers to enterprise of all OECD countries and the World Bank ranks us as one of the best places to do business.

So why don’t we believe it? The most common complaint is that we still lag a long way behind the US when it comes to entrepreneurship. For the most part, it's a fair comment. But it's encouraging that most of the entrepreneurs that I have spoken to recently haven't recognised national borders or established corporate players as barriers to entry - they're fully aware that investors want to see a business that's scaled globally.

As such, the next generation of wealth creators has had to get creative. US entrepreneurs don't need to look beyond their own borders to find a market of 300 million people. No surprise then that our own enterprise culture has traditionally looked decidedly parochial by comparison. The web, global and heterogeneous in its reach, has changed all that. It’s even shaping the kind of entrepreneur that's emerging.

Ben Way is just one of the bright young things that have been telling me that we’re already becoming a more entrepreneurial country. His desire to combine the UK’s fledgling and disparate business networks into something more concrete - a community that can inspire and support itself, and more importantly, do the same for the next generation of entrepreneurs - is admirable, but far from isolated.

Cambridge graduate Saul Klein - a name enviably synonymous with Skype, Last.fm and Lovefilm - will tell you that he had to head off to the US to learn his craft. Evidence that we're still lagging behind? Perhaps, but to accentuate that fact would be to miss the point. Now he's back in the UK, Klein is another example of a wealth creator who wants to inspire a collaborative approach between entrepreneurs and investors, a refreshing anathema to the divisive, cut-throat competitiveness of old. His OpenCoffee Club, where entrepreneurs, developers and investors organise real-world informal meet-ups to chat, network and grow, has been a roaring success and now runs in 80 cities around the world.

Of course, the US doesn't have all the answers. Indeed, we've even got a few of our own. The AIM market, for example, is proving to be something of a lure for growing American companies seeking access to capital markets away from the stifling and costly constraints of the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act.

A response to the slew of corporate and accounting scandals that accompanied the turning of the new century, the Act aimed to restore public confidence in America’s securities markets by requiring public companies to test and document their accounting processes in minute detail.

Serious questions are being asked about the competitive disadvantage SOX places smaller US firms, innovators and entrepreneurs at when they’re looking to raise capital. In the twelve months following its introduction, it was estimated to have cost US business an eye watering $30bn. The expense is especially prohibitive if you’re an SME looking to list in order to fund growth. With America 'regulating itself to death', as US Treasury Security Henry Paulson put it, American companies are looking to London for a lighter regulatory touch; of the 329 international companies on the list, 92 are from the States. Perhaps we can still teach our American cousins something about encouraging enterprise after all.