Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: Data Collection Design and Implementation 1998–2003

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor research program was designed as a comprehensive assessment of the role of entrepreneurship in national economic growth. The conceptual model reflected in a wide range of factors associated with national variations in entrepreneurial activity and the major contextual features. Empirical tests of the many relationships in the model required four major data collection activities: adult population surveys, unstructured interviews with national experts, self-administered questionnaires completed by national experts, and assembly of relevant standardized measures from existing cross-national data sets. Adult population surveys were implemented to identify those entrepreneurially active, which required a set of precise criteria and careful processing to ensure harmonized counts and prevalence rates across 41 countries. Existing evidence on measures of reliability indicates that the measures met contemporary standards and the project was cost-effective.     

Metropolregionen: Impulsgeber für Strukturwandel und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung

Urban centres and their surroundings often act as highly dynamic economic areas. Due to continuing urban migration, population growth as well as their heightened potential for employment, they have significant impact on Germany’s overall economic performance. Cities benefit from their neighbouring regions via a division of labour based on functional and spatial comparative advantages. Jobs in the service sector are concentrated in the city, while surrounding regions show a relatively high specialisation in the industrial sector. The economic development of metropolitan regions can be fostered particularly by improving supra-regional metropolitan functions related to education and to research and development. Moreover, the improvement of the intra-regional infrastructure also contributes to the economic strength of the whole metropolitan area.     

Formal and informal external linkages and firms�� innovative strategies. A cross-country comparison

Firms increasingly rely upon external actors for their innovation process. Interaction with these actors may occur formally (i.e. through a collaboration agreement) or informally (i.e. external actors acts as sources of information). We analyze the reasons why firms consider it to be important to develop formal and informal external linkages in the innovation process by looking at the role played by firms’ innovative strategies and by taking into account the possibility that a complementarity or substitutive relationship might exist between formal and informal linkages. Data are from the Third Community Innovation Survey (CIS 3), where we have access to firm level micro-data from Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and the UK.