Posts filed under 'Entrepreneurship'
Scott Shane Blogging at the NYT
| Peter Klein |
Scott joins the “You’re the Boss” blogging team (via Dane Stangler).
Add comment 3 July 2009
2009 SES Boot Camp
| Peter Klein |
Just received the Call for Papers for the 2009 edition of the Society for Entrepreneurship Scholars Manuscript Boot Camp, this year at Johns Hopkins University right before the SMS Conference in October. I participated last year and had a terrific experience (OK, it was at a ski resort, but that has nothing to do with it). Submissions due 4 August 2009. Details below the fold. (more…)
Add comment 7 June 2009
World Bank’s “Doing Business” Changing Course
| Benito Arruñada |
Thanks to O&M for the opportunity to join the conversation. I plan to be blogging about some issues discussed in my book.
One of my recent research areas is the cost of business formalization. In particular, I have criticized the World Bank’s Doing Business project for the narrow focus of its “Starting a Business” indicator on reducing the initial costs of incorporating companies (Arruñada, 2007, 2009), which disregards the more important role of business registers as a source of reliable information for judges, which is essential for reducing transaction costs in future business dealings. In many developing countries, registers produce documents that judges do not trust and, therefore, registration does not facilitate impersonal transactions that it should be supporting. Reducing the explicit cost of registers and speeding production of useless paperwork will not help. The priorities of reform policies should therefore be thoroughly reviewed, aiming first for registers to achieve a minimum reliability. (See this discussion).
In April, following continuing pressure by Barney Frank, chairman of the US House Financial Services Committee, the World Bank decided to drop Doing Business’s “Employing Workers Indicator” and develop a new “Worker Protection Indicator” after concluding that the first indicator “does not represent World Bank policy and should not be used as a basis for policy advice or in any country programme documents that outline or evaluate the development strategy or assistance programme for a recipient country” (Aslam, 2009).
In line with my argument about registration, meaningful indicators of institutional quality should be comprehensive of costs and values. Therefore, an indicator of the quality of employment regulation should consider not only workers’ protection but other aspects, such as, most prominently, unemployment rates.
1 comment 4 June 2009
Entrepreneurship Exemplars Conference
| Dick Langlois |
The Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the UConn business school is sponsoring an “exemplars” conference in conjunction with the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. The idea of the conference is to help young scholars by providing “exemplars” of good scholarship. Editors from the top management and entrepreneurship journals are here (including frequent O&M participant Joe Mahoney) to comment on these exemplar papers and provide advice.
The conference started last night with a keynote by Venkat Venkataraman and continues through Saturday. You can actually participate in the conference online: register here. I am about to wander over (physically, not electronically) to hear Jay Barney’s keynote at 10:50 EDT.
Add comment 29 May 2009
PAL Team on Microfinance
| Peter Klein |
As a microfinance skeptic I was particularly interested in the new paper from the J-PAL team of Banerjee, Duflo, Glennerster, and Kinnan, “The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation.” Despite the pedestrian abstract, the findings are pretty significant:
To date there have been no randomized trials examining the impact of microcredit. Using such a design, 52 of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of an MFI branch while the remainder were not. We show that the intervention increased total MFI borrowing, and study the effects on new business starts, investment, and consumption. Households with an existing business at the time of the program invest in durable goods, and their profi ts increase. Households with high propensity to become business owners see a decrease in nondurable consumption, consistent with the need to pay a fixed cost to enter entrepreneurship. Households with low propensity to become business owners see nondurable spending increase. We find no impact on measures of health, education, or women’s decision-making.
Ryan Hahn puts it this way: The verdict is in on microfinance. . . . And it’s not pretty.” He means that microfinance does appear to have a positive marginal effect on business formation and expansion, but the effect is modest and does not (at least within a 15-18-month timeframe) have any discernible effect on well-being.
Add comment 27 May 2009
ACAC Schedule
| Peter Klein |
The Atlanta Competitive Advantage Conference begins tomorrow. The updated schedule, along with other logistical information, is here. You can also download many of the papers. Emory, Georgia Tech, and Georgia State Universities have co-hosted this event the past five years and it’s become one of the main events for research in strategy, organizational economics, entrepreneurship, and related fields.
2 comments 18 May 2009
The Symbolic Uses of Politics
| Dick Langlois |
One of the most interesting law-and-economics scholars out there is Amitai Aviram at the University of Illinois, whom I met at a conference a few years ago. I only just discovered his recent work on what he calls bias arbitrage, “the extraction of private benefits through actions that identify and mitigate discrepancies between objective risks and the public’s perception of the same risks.” The idea is that people often misperceive the risks of various events. This creates an entrepreneurial opportunity for someone who can benefit from manipulating those misperceptions.
In some ways, this is an elaboration of Murray Jacob Edelman’s The Symbolic Uses of Politics (1964). In Edelman’s story, the citizenry are worried about various large issues about which they have no control: the Russians, global warming, swine flu, or — Edelman’s example, as I recall — the threat of business monopolies. In most cases, these fears are exaggerated or have no basis at all in fact — like the fear of spontaneous monopolies. But politicians can advance themselves by taking symbolic steps to allay these fears — like passing the Sherman Antitrust Act. (As Tom DiLorenzo, Jack High, Tom Hazlett, and others have suggested, the Sherman Act was also about diverting attention away from the McKinley tariffs, which would indeed transfer income from consumers to producers.)
Aviram’s spin is that there can be a welfare-improving effect to this process, to the extent that, by changing people’s perceptions of the underlying risks, entrepreneurs can bring people’s assessments in line with the actual underlying risks and thus get people to behave more efficiently. One example he uses is security measures at airports. After 9/11, people overestimated the probability of highjackings and shifted away in droves from air travel and toward automobile travel, which is actually a less-safe alternative. By instituting the ceremony of airline security, the government might have persuaded people that the probability of highjackings went down — even though it probably didn’t go down and was already low anyway — and therefore got them to return to (safer) air travel, an efficient outcome even taking into account the costs of the ceremony. (If you don’t believe that the ceremonies of the Transportation Security Administration are purely symbolic — or even if you do — check out this interesting piece in the Atlantic Monthly a while back.) Aviram understands perfectly well that this process can also lead to bad outcomes: the much-discussed case of seatbelt laws making car travel less safe might be an example. Whether the placebo effect (as Aviram calls it) has good or bad effects is a case-by-case question. One might well wonder whether today, eight years almost since 9/11, it isn’t the case that airport security ceremonies actually serve to remind people of terrorist threats and therefore to raise their assessments of the probabilities (?)
I thought of all of this recently in my own local context. Because of the recession, the State government has imposed on the University a variety of purely symbolic measures to demonstrate our frugality to the voting public. At least in principle, faculty can’t travel out of state even on money that came from grants or awards. And the library and museums were recently instructed to shorten their opening hours, even though those shorter hours don’t in fact save any money.
2 comments 30 April 2009
Opportunity Discovery Measurement Scale Bleg
| Nicolai Foss |
Opportunity discovery is a key construct in large parts of the recent management literature on entrepreneurship (e.g., this important paper). We have often blogged on opportunity discovery here on O&M, for example, noting the problematic relation of the management construct of opportunity discovery to Kirzner’s original notion, and suggesting that new projects may be superior units of analysis for certain purposes.
Still, the sensing, perception, discovery of, etc. opportunities is surely relevant in entrepreneurship studies and should not be bypassed. Which brings us to the issue of, How is it measured? Given that dozens of articles have been written now with “opportunity discovery” in the title, I am struck by the paucity of empirical work that actually makes a stab at measuring opportunity discovery. Most articles on opportunity discovery are theoretical. And most consider the antecedents of opportunity discovery (e.g., personal knowledge, psychological attributes, search costs) rather than the discovery itself. (more…)
1 comment 24 April 2009
SecondMarket
| Peter Klein |
Props to Molly Burress for pointing me to this article in today’s NYT on SecondMarket, a website that acts as a market-maker for illiquid assets. According to the Times SecondMarket is developing secondary markets for restricted public equities, bankruptcy claims, mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, and other non-marketed financial claims. As the Times points out, the weak IPO market of the last few years has made VCs reluctant to invest in early-stage ventures; by giving VCs an additional exit option, SecondMarket may increase the flow of venture funding.
Not addressed in the article: If SecondMarket succeeds, and grows, and begins to impose disclosure requirements on the companies whose (now-liquid) assets are traded, will private equity lose its purported advantrages over public equity, in the Jensen (1989) sense?
Add comment 23 April 2009
More Economic Institutions of Strategy
| Nicolai Foss |
In his post of yesterday, Peter failed to mention that among the O&M bloggers not just Klein and Lien but also yours truly contributed to the Nickerson and Silverman 2009 edition of Advances in Strategic Management. Specifically, with Stieglitz (Nils — and with an “e”) I have written “Opportunities and New Business Models: Transaction Costs and Property Rights Perspectives on Entrepreneurship.” The paper can be downloaded from SSRN.
1 comment 21 April 2009
Information Encountering
| Peter Klein |
I recently attended an interesting workshop by my colleague Sanda Erdelez from the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies (what used to be called library science, back when we had libraries). Sanda has developed the concept of information encountering, defined as
a memorable experience of an unexpected discovery of useful or interesting information. Information encountering occurs when one is looking for information relating to one topic and finds information relating to another one. However, it also occurs upon bumping into information while carrying on a routine activity.
During the workshop we discussed the parallels between information encountering and Kirzner’s notion of entrepreneurial discovery. Both are different from systematic search, yet more than pure accident. (As Sanda reminded us, “serendipity,” often used today as a synonym for luck, originally meant the discovery of one thing while searching systematically for another.) More generally, we agreed that the entrepreneurship and information-science literatures can learn from each other. We also discussed Nicholas Carr’s recent Atlantic Monthly piece, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” which argues, in part, that the ability to find specific information quickly makes us less likely to discover useful information accidentally.
Here is more of Sanda’s research. The terms “accidental discovery of information” and “incidental information acquisition” are also used in the information-science literature.
2 comments 16 April 2009
Law and Economics of Innovation
| Peter Klein |
I’m speaking at this year’s edition of the Law and Economics of Innovation, organized by Geoff Manne and Josh Wright and co-sponsored by GMU Law and Microsoft. It’s May 7 in Arlington. Check out the slick conference website (and Geoff’s post at ToTM). If you don’t want to hear me, at least come for Susan Athey’s keynote. Tom Hazlett has the best paper subtitle: “Of Newtons, Blackberries, iPhones & G-Phones.” How many of you youngsters have heard of the Newton?
2 comments 13 April 2009
Program for Searle Center Conference, “The Economics and Law of the Entrepreneur”
| Peter Klein |
Here. I participated in last year’s conference and thought it was terrific. Old friend Henry Butler is doing a fine job making the Searle Center a major player in the entrepreneurship field.
Add comment 9 April 2009
Kahneman on Judgment and Intuition
| Peter Klein |
Still confused about the differences between judgment and intuition? This lecture by Daniel Kaheman, “Judgment and Intuition,” might help. It’s one of several posted on Kahneman’s website.
Add comment 8 April 2009
Value Creation in Middle-Market Buyouts
| Peter Klein |
Here’s a paper by John Chapman and me, “Value Creation in Middle-Market Buyouts: A Transaction-Level Analysis,” forthcoming in Douglas J. Cumming, ed., Companion to Private Equity (New York: Wiley, 2009). Get your copy today, while they’re hot. Abstract:
Is private equity an effective governance structure, or simply a means of transferring wealth from “Main Street” to “Wall Street”? How do buyouts affect target-company organization and strategy? How do deal characteristics such as size, industry, transaction complexity, buyer characteristics, holding period, and the like affect the performance of private-equity transactions? Are revenue improvements driven primarily by changes in employment and capital expenditures, or by changes in organization and strategy? Despite a healthy literature on buyouts, little is known about the details of private equity transactions, as most studies rely on publicly available data or confidential data from a single buyout firm. This paper uses a unique sample of 288 exited transactions over a 20-year period across 19 industries from 13 buyout firm firms, based on confidential data from detailed interviews with the general partners of several leading private-equity partnerships. While prior studies have focused on whole-company, going-private buyouts, our sample includes transactions with minority stakes, syndicate deals, and consolidating roll-up or add-on strategies, and we have detailed information on internal rates of return, leverage, equity stakes, and other deal characteristics. We find that the pursuit of ancillary consolidating acquisitions is the biggest driver of post-buyout revenue and profit growth, that solo deals and deals with controlling stakes outperform syndicated or “club” deals, that rates of return have declined over time as buyout markets have become more competitive, that mitigation of agency costs is critical for deal success, and more generally, that private equity can improve the performance even of sound businesses by providing access to resources, industry-specific expertise, capital for recombining assets (most often, consolidation in a fragmented industry), or recapitalization and ownership transition. Finally, our findings suggest the potential for further research of private equity at the transaction level.
Add comment 3 April 2009
Public Entrepreneurship
| Peter Klein |
A surprising aspect of the recent growth in the entrepreneurship literature is the number of papers, projects, courses, centers, etc. studying entrepreneurship in non-market settings: “social entrepreneurship,” “cultural entrepreneurship,” “environmental entrepreneurship,” and so on. At my own university students can take entrepreneurship courses not only in the Colleges of Business or Engineering but in the College of Agriculture, the School of Natural Resources, the College of Journalism, and even the School of Social Work. (One of my colleagues organized a conference last year aimed at cattle ranchers seeking to market their, um, byproducts as fertilizer, with the classic title: “Manure Entrepreneurship: Turning Brown into Green.”
Translating concepts, theories, and research methods from the entrepreneurship literature to non-market settings raises challenging issue, however. How is entrepreneurship defined? What corresponds to entrepreneurial profit and loss? What is the entrepreneur’s objective function? Are there competitive processes that select for the better entrepreneurs? None of the classic writers on entrepreneurship — Cantillon, Say, Schumpeter, Knight, Mises, Kirzner — wrote explicitly on entrepreneurship in non-market settings, as far as I am aware. Mises, in fact, distinguishes sharply between “profit management” (or entrepreneurial management) and “bureaucratic management,” identifying the former with initiative, responsibility, creativity, and novelty and the latter with rule-following within strict guidelines (see Bureaucracy, 1944, and chapter 15, section 10 of Human Action, 1949). (more…)
1 comment 27 March 2009
Sarasvathy Slides
| Peter Klein |
Saras Sarasvathy has kindly agreed to share the slides from her recent presentation on effectuation.
Add comment 20 March 2009
New McKinsey Videos
| Peter Klein |
Acumen Fund founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz shares stories of social-sector entrepreneurship in an excerpt from her new book, The Blue Sweater. A video interview with the author takes you behind the book.
Google’s chief economist says executives in wired organizations need a sharper understanding of how technology empowers innovation.
Tarun Khanna says their common optimistic entrepreneurialism makes them a formidable force.
Add comment 10 March 2009
Sarasvathy at Missouri
| Peter Klein |
Saras Sarasvathy comes to our campus this Thursday, 5 March, for a seminar on the effectuation approach to entrepreneurship. Details are at the McQuinn Center site. Those of you within driving distance to Columbia should consider coming over. Friday she’s keynoting the Gateway Entrepreneurship Research Conference at St. Louis University.
Saras presented this material last summer at SMG, before Nicolai; here’s another opportunity to brainwash her into adopting the Foss-Klein perspective. Kool-Aid for lunch!
Update: Can she build on the excitement generated by Jimmy John?
Add comment 2 March 2009
Computable Entrepreneurship
| Dick Langlois |
I just returned from New York, where I was a discussant at a session on entrepreneurship. (Peter was supposed to have been part of the session — too bad he couldn’t make it.) I discussed a presentation by my old friend Roger Koppl. I have written before about Roger’s work on forensic science administration. This presentation, which drew on a couple of Roger’s recent papers (see here and here), was called “Who Needs Entrepreneurs?” Here is the abstract:
The mathematics of “computable economics” proves that entrepreneurship policy is unlikely to succeed if it presumes policy makers can replace the unplanned results of the entrepreneurial market process with ex ante judgments about which enterprises are best. It is mathematically impossible for policy makers or their assignees to make the required computations of opportunity costs. Some business professors dream of finding a grand algorithm that will allow them to guide entrepreneurial decisions and to judge in advance which decisions are good and which bad. The logic of computable economics, however, reveals this dream to be a form of magical thinking.
This is fascinating stuff that should be of considerable interest to O&M readers.
10 comments 2 March 2009
Slides on “Putting Entrepreneurship into Strategy and Organization”
| Peter Klein |
You’ve read the book. You’ve seen the movie. You attended the seminar. Now download the slides. Or something like that. Anyway, Lasse begged me to post the slides from this morning’s talk at NHH — or maybe he begged me not to post them, I forget which — so here they are. Some of the slides may not make much sense without the animation (and accompanying patter), but sadly the event was not captured on video, where it could have won next year’s Oscar in the “Best Obscure Academic Talk” category.
Add comment 23 February 2009
Klein Seminar at NHH
| Lasse Lien |
Monday will be a big day at the Norwegian School of Ecomics and Business Administation. P. G. Klein will give a seminar under the title “Putting Entreprenurship Into Organization and Strategy Research.” Not only will he give a seminar, but we shall have the pleasure of his company from Sunday until Wednesday. If Peter’s blogging frequency goes down early next week it will be because he’s having such a good time here, and if it goes up, it will be because he is so inspired by being here.
7 comments 20 February 2009
Kirzner on Kirzner
| Peter Klein |
In a recent paper I wrote that much of the contemporary entrepreneurship literature on opportunity identification
misses . . . the point of Kirzner’s metaphor of entrepreneurial alertness: namely that it is only a metaphor. Kirzner’s aim is not to characterize entrepreneurship per se, but to explain the tendency for markets to clear. In the Kirznerian system, opportunities are (exogenous) arbitrage opportunities and nothing more. Entrepreneurship itself serves a purely instrumental function; it is the means by which Kirzner explains market clearing.
Some readers have challenged me on this point. In my defense, I call upon none other than Israel Kirzner, whose newest paper, “The Alert and Creative Entrepreneur: A Clarification,” appears in the February 2009 issue of Small Business Economics (working-paper version here). Kirzner seeks to clarify the nature of his classic contribution, concerned that he has been misinterpreted by friend and foe alike. Writes Kirzner:
[M]y own work has nothing to say about the secrets of successful entrepreneurship. My work has explored, not the nature of the talents needed for entrepreneurial success, not any guidelines to be followed by would-be successful entrepreneurs, but, instead, the nature of the market process set in motion by the entrepreneurial decisions (both successful and unsuccessful ones!). . . . This paper seeks (a) to identify more carefully the sense in which my work on entrepreneurial theory does not throw light on the substantive sources of successful entrepreneurship, (b) to argue that a number of (sympathetic) reviewers of my work have somehow failed to recognize this limitation in the scope of my work (and that these scholars have therefore misunderstood certain aspects of my theoretical system), (c) to show that, despite all of the above, my understanding of the market process (as set in motion by entrepreneurial decisions) can, in a significant sense, provide a theoretical underpinning for public policy in regard to entrepreneurship.
Kirzner devotes the bulk of his attention to the contrast between Kirznerian and Schumpeterian entrerpreneurship, while my paper focuses on the differences between Kirzner and Knight. Still, I’m gratified that Kirzner appears to view today’s applied entrepreneurship literature, in relation to his own work, the same way I do.
1 comment 14 January 2009
Pomo Alert: New Management Journal Special Issues
| Peter Klein |
We haven’t raised the pomo periscope for a while, but two recent management journal special issues call for its return. The June 2008 issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management contains a symposium on “Recreating/Recontextualising Entrepreneurship,” which includes such articles as “Accidental Ventures — A Materialist Reading of Opportunity and Entrepreneurial Potential” and “Transduction and Entrepreneurship: A Biophilosophical Image of the Entrepreneur.” Then there’s the new issue of ephemera, with the theme “University, Failed” and articles like “Institutionalizing Critique: A Problem of Critical Management Studies,” “Epistemic Convenience,” “I Wanted to Be an Academic, Not a ‘Creative’: Notes on Universities and the New Capitalism, and “We Are All Workers: A Class Analysis of University Labour Strikes.” Hoo-boy.
1 comment 23 December 2008
Indigenous Entrepreneurship in Rural China
| Peter Klein |
A very interesting article in the McKinsey Quarterly by MIT’s Yasheng Huang: “Private Ownership: The Real Source of China’s Economic Miracle.” The key to China’s recent economic is not state-led capitalism (call it ”Bush-Bernanke-Paulson capitalism”) but private property and financial-market liberalization, leading to a burst of indigenous rural entrepreneurship. Writes Huang:
Big cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen are routinely extolled in the Western press as vibrant growth centers. China’s rural areas, if mentioned at all, typically figure as impoverished backwaters. But a close analysis of the economic data reveals that these breathless descriptions of China’s modern city skylines have it exactly backward: in fact, the economy was most dynamic in rural China, while heavy-handed government intervention has stifled entrepreneurialism and ownership in the urban centers.
Particularly interesting is Huang’s account of why so many Western economists fail to understand this. (more…)
Add comment 19 December 2008
Bygrave on the State of Entrepreneurship Research
| Peter Klein |
William Bygrave surveys the field and concludes that it’s “dominated by quantitative research driven almost exclusively by statistical analysis with SPSS and that qualitative research is seldom published in the leading entrepreneurship journals. He regrets that it is almost impossible to get purely empirical paper published in the leading journal. He pleads with journal editors and their review boards to become less narrow minded and much more pluralistic.”
Bygrave’s assessment is valuable but I think limited by its focus on the “traditional” entrepreneurship journals (e.g., JBV, ETP, SBE). Newer journals such as the SEJ and, more important, the entrepreneurship research that increasingly appears in the top mainstream strategy, organization, and economics journals tends to have a different, and more varied, character.
3 comments 17 December 2008
Off to Boot Camp
| Peter Klein |
I’ll be in Utah this week for the Society for Entrepreneurship Scholars conference, also known as “Manuscript Boot Camp.” It’s a sort of cross between a regular academic conference and a professional development workshop, with an interesting and unusual format. The conference is organized around a set of competitively selected working papers written by PhD students and junior faculty, who will be paired with a rotating series of senior scholars for one-on-one mentoring sessions designed to improve the quality of the papers for publication. These sessions, combined with plenary roundtables and lots of informal interaction, should make for a fun and professionally valuable event, for all concerned. I wish more workshops were organized this way.
The set of senior scholar-mentors includes many of the biggest names in entrepreneurship and strategy research, people like Rajshree Agarwal, David Deeds, Greg Dess, Jeff Dyer, Bill Hesterly, Bob Hoskisson, Jeff Reuer, Harry Sapienza, Bill Schulze, Dave Whetten, and your humble correspondent. More important, the participant list includes several bloggers — me and orgtheory’s Teppo Felin among the mentors, Brian McCann of Management R&D and former O&M guest blogger Chihmao Hsieh among the mentees — so expect good during- and post-conference reporting in the blogosphere.
My only concern, expressed to co-organizer Bill Shulze yesterday, is fitting that many egos into a single room. His solution: “free beer.”
Add comment 9 December 2008
A Note on Systems Integration
| Dick Langlois |
First let me apologize for being out of circulation for so long. I’ve been inundated with teaching and committee work this semester, but I hope to get back in the swing of things as the year winds down.
The New York Times had an interesting article the other day on a company called Super Micro Computer, a public family-run company in San Jose that puts together leading-edge servers and other hardware for clients that include eBay and Yahoo. The company sells high performance and speed, both the speed of the computer and the speed of the company in designing and delivering its products.
Whereas rivals long ago sent key design work to Asia to take advantage of cheaper, plentiful labor, Super Micro still relies on hundreds of expensive engineers working at its San Jose headquarters. These workers are charged with grabbing the latest and greatest components from suppliers and coming up with new designs months ahead of lumbering heavyweights like Hewlett-Packard and Dell.
Clayton Christensen and his coauthors have argued that a premium on high performance calls for vertical integration and systemic integration in order to fine tune and customize systems, whereas a premium on cost reduction leads to modularity, standardization, and vertical disintegration. The Super Micro case seems to question this conclusion. On the one hand, the company emphasizes design and produces customized units. On the other hand, however, the company is really just a systems integrator — not a vertically integrated company — whose advantage lies in discovering and making use of the innovation of others. In Carliss Baldwin’s phrase, the company “leverages modularity” along the performance margin in much the same way that Dell does (or at least once did) along the cost margin. My conjecture is that, the more inherently modular (whatever that means) the product is, the more systemic integration can be squeezed into a single independent stage of production (systems integration) and the less necessary is genuine vertical integration — even when performance is what matters.
2 comments 25 November 2008
Entrepreneurship Links
| Peter Klein |
- The World Bank’s 2008 Entrepreneurship Survey and Database. Includes over 100 countries.
- A new RAND report, Enhancing Small-Business Opportunities in the DoD. Our own Cliff Grammich is one of the authors.
- The Call for Papers for the Searle Center’s Second Annual Research Symposium on The Economics and Law of the Entrepreneur (11-12 June 2009). I attended the first one and it was really great.
Add comment 20 November 2008
Sentences to Ponder
| Peter Klein |
Although it does very well on the share of total jobs created by new firms, America scores highest of all in terms of the percentage of its lost jobs that are destroyed by enterprises’ going out of business. Perhaps, in the spirit of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of creative destruction, it is the ability for firms to fail — and for the entrepreneurs involved to escape without stigma — that provides the overlooked but crucial part of the American entrepreneurial culture.
That’s from an Economist story on Global Entrepreneurship Week (did you know it started Monday?) that focuses on the Kauffman Foundation’s work on collecting and analyzing global data on startups, firm growth, innovation, bankruptcy, and the like. The story opens with one of the all-time great (and probably apocryphal) Bushisms: “the problem with the French is they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” (Thanks to Chris Boessen for the pointer.)
1 comment 19 November 2008
