Reassessing Portfolio Entrepreneurship

Portfolio entrepreneurship, that is the simultaneous ownership of several businesses, is becoming an important theme in the small business research literature. To date, however, there have been few dedicated empirical investigations of the phenomenon. This article analyses research on portfolio entrepreneurship that has been derived from a wide range of subject literatures, including economic sociology, cultural anthropology and agricultural economics. The aim is to provide a deeper understanding of the motivations for portfolio entrepreneurship approaches and the processes associated with it.     

Internationalising Entrepreneurship Education

Despite growing policy and research interest in small firm internationalisation, little attention has been focused on the international dimensions of entrepreneurship and even less on the academic formation and personal/professional development of international entrepreneurs. The need to address these issues is particularly crucial in light of the emergence of small entrepreneurial “born global” firms that have able to take advantage of technological advances to internationalise rapidly. This contribution outlines and evaluates approaches that have been adopted to embed international entrepreneurship dimensions in undergraduate and postgraduate business programmes in Ireland. The authors contend that many of these mechanisms are eminently transferable to educational programmes in other locations.     

Entrepreneurship and welfare

Here, I examine returns to entrepreneurship using a standard measure of welfare, the per-capita consumption expenditure. This analysis, using quantile regressions, reveals the existence of a welfare hierarchy in occupations. The results suggest that, across the welfare distribution, entrepreneurs who employ others have the highest returns in terms of consumption, while those entrepreneurs who work for themselves, that is, self-employed individuals, have slightly lower returns than the salaried employees. However, self-employment entails higher returns than casual labor and a relative escape from poverty.     

Entrepreneurship in China

Small Business Economics - China’s economic transition has greatly unleashed entrepreneurship and private enterprise development since the 1980s. In this article, we review the recent...     

Entrepreneurship in Europe

This article focuses on the changes in attitude and venture capital provision that the author believes are necessary to rekindle the spirit of entrepreneurship in Europe. The article goes on to discuss technology clusters and the role of stock markets. It then describes the way the Cambridge-based Amadeus venture capital company sets about the venture capital process. It concludes with a plea for entrepreneurship centres to be set up in each university and for some changes in government policy.     

Entrepreneurship as Recombinant Growth

The paper presents a model of the entrepreneur as an undertaker of new combinations of ideas. Technology is seen as a set of ideas in a metric technology space where new knowledge is created by the combination of older ideas in the spirit of Schumpeter (1934), Weitzman (1998) and Olsson (2000). Given some intuitive assumptions, we demonstrate that technological progress generated by the convex combination of ideas is constrained by five factors: First, the combinatory process eventually leads to the exhaustion of technological opportunity. Second, the cost of combining ideas increases with the technological distance between the originating ideas. Third, profits are maximized when ideas are combined that are technologically close. Fourth, the technology set is constrained by a social possibility set of socially acceptable ideas. Fifth, the boundaries implied by the ruling technological paradigm limit the scope for eternal recombinant growth.     

Entrepreneurship and innovation networks

In this paper, we give a general introduction to the notion of entrepreneurship and how it has many complex meanings. Entrepreneurs in new firms but also in incumbent firms have a key role in local, regional and national economic development by taking risks to get things done by developing new combinations of ideas and/or doing things differently. In view of this, two of the main questions that are dealt with are: (1) which features make structural differences in institutions and innovation networks remain invariant between decades, and (2) how knowledge about such features can be employed in policy at the national and the regional level. The research questions highlighted in this special issue relate to many pertinent national and regional policy issues. The most apparent concerns conditions conducive for entrepreneurship in the form of new firms and firm growth. In this paper, we also introduce the different contributors to this special issue.     

Public Policy Toward Entrepreneurship

There is widespread support for tax policies providing special treatment for small businesses. This paper reviews standard efficiency and equity criteria for such tax-subsidies, and finds they provide little support for such policies. The review highlights a central empirical void requiring further research: the "optimal" business failure rate. Entrepreneurs do struggle, and small businesses frequently merge and nearly as frequently fail. But we do not know enough to determine which firms to target for success or failure.     

Entrepreneurship and international business

Henry Wai‐chung Yeung. 2002. Entrepreneurship and the Internationalisation of Asian Firms: An Institutional Perspective. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited. 311 pages. ISBN 1‐84064‐734‐5. Victoria E. Bonnell & Thomas B. Gold (Eds.). 2002. The New Entrepreneurs of Europe and Asia: Patterns of Business Development in Russia, Eastern Europe and China. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. 357 pages. ISBN 0‐7656‐0775‐1.     

The Social Entrepreneurship Zone

Social entrepreneurship is still in the developmental stage as a field of inquiry. In this article we introduce the concept of the social entrepreneurship zone. This new construct positions social entrepreneurship relative to the ways organizations plan to implement social change and the degrees to which they apply business practices to do so. Two new categories of organizations, social transformation entrepreneurial ventures and social improvement entrepreneurial ventures, reside in the social entrepreneurship zone. This categorization separates social entrepreneurial ventures into 2 distinct groups with their own unique set of characteristics. The social entrepreneurship zone construct should help researchers and other stakeholders better understand this emerging field so it can be further studied and developed.     

Entrepreneurship and Risk Premium

This article deals with the measurement and determination of entrepreneurship. It utilises the issue of the absence of the entrepreneur from neoclassical theory and uses the theory of portfolio management to establish a model connecting risk premium with the entrepreneurship premium. It shows that the non-systematic risk may be a satisfactory proxy of the level of entrepreneurial activity. The development of successful entrepreneurial activity proxy contributes towards the development of a theorisation of entrepreneurship and an assessment of its contribution to growth.     

Entrepreneurship and Risk Aversion

Evans and Jovanovic (1989, Journal of Political Economy 97(4), 808–827) find that wealth is an important determinant of business startups due to liquidity constraints. However, Cressy (2000, Economic Letters 66, 235–240) argues that if risk aversion is a negative function of wealth, Evans and Jovanovic’s empirical results could be spurious and the positive effect of wealth could be due to the omission of risk aversion in the regression equation. In other words, according to Cressy, one’s wealth does not have any effect on business startups once the degree of risk aversion is accounted for. This paper attempts to investigate the validity of Cressy’s conjecture. We empirically examine the effect of wealth on the transition into self-employment, while allowing for the effect of risk aversion. Our empirical findings show that Evans and Jovanovic’s (1989) results are robust, i.e., wealth has a positive effect on business startups even allowing for the confounding effects of risk aversion.     

Virtual Instant Global Entrepreneurship

International entrepreneurship must be hard, because so few firms attempt it. If true, perhaps it is hard because it requires knowledge about people and places far away. It is hard because it requires mastering processes to handle business across borders. And it is hard because it requires trust in the processes and eventually in the customers elsewhere. These three elements, knowledge, mastery and trust in international business are essential to the success of international entrepreneurship for SMEs.     

Potential Entrepreneurship in Japan

The aim of this paper is to investigate the potential for entrepreneurship in Japan using the Employment Status Survey, which is the only government-administered survey that includes questions about the desire to become an entrepreneur. We find that there are still a number of potential entrepreneurs in Japan, despite a recent decline in the number of new firms being established. We also find that there is a large regional variation in the distribution of entrepreneurial potential, with clustering into a few regions and the level in Tokyo being exceptional. Further, using panel data on 47 prefectures from 1982 to 1997, we examine the determinants of entrepreneurial potential. The estimation results show that the price-cost margin, market size, market growth and the unemployment rate have positive effects on the potential for entrepreneurship.     

High-Growth Entrepreneurship in Mexico

Research from the United States finds a small percentage of firms are responsible for the great majority of net new job creation. We now have a fairly precise set of stylized facts regarding the characteristics of these high-growth firms (HGFs). However, we have little understanding of HGFs in Latin America. To address this gap, we explore the characteristics of HGFs in Mexico selected by Endeavor, a global business accelerator. We find Mexican HGFs are present in a wide range of industries, including information technology and consumer segments. Several are pursuing strategies targeting base of the pyramid consumers and/or expanding internationally. We conclude with suggestions for future research and policy implications.     

Entrepreneurship: Psion and Europe

This article is drawn from the first of the 1998 Stockton Lectures which focus on the subject of entrepreneurship. Here, David Potter, the founder of Psion, uses his own experience to identify the challenges facing business in Europe in a world of rapid and continuing change. For him, the key equation is Risk=Opportunity.