"A 'must-read' book ... filled with practical information and numerous case studies on what aspiring entrepreneurs and business owners need to know to run a profitable business...the author reminds the reader not to confuse the excitement and enthusiasm of starting a business and being a business owner with the skills required to be successful and avoid becoming one of the 80% of businesses that will eventually fail. A major contribution of this book is its continuous emphasis on the importance of having a business model as a critical requirement to start and manage a profitable business."-Edgar Ortiz, CEO of Strategic Analytic Solutions and business columnist for the "Atlanta Journal-Constitution"Ralph Blanchard, a successful entrepreneur with a background in economics, provides a detailed analysis of what it is really like to buy, start, operate, and eventually sell a small business. Topics covered include: why most businesses fail ten management skills found in successful small businessowners strategies to transition from self-employment toentrepreneurship advantages that small business owners have over largercompetitors tips to develop profitable pricing strategies innovative ideas to help develop a sound business model

Asia is highly regarded as one of the fastest growing regions in the world, and this unique Handbook focuses on the internationalization process and entrepreneurial dynamics of small business within the continent. Using a clear and consistent style, the Handbook examines more than 40 countries in Asia and allows researchers to compare the environment for entrepreneurship, the internationalization of entrepreneurs and the state of small business in different Asian countries. The chapters are authored by well-known scholars who provide insight into how government policies have affected the internationalization of small firms in Asia. This comprehensive reference work will provide a timely and important basis for scholars to understand entrepreneurship in Asia. Public policy analysts of international entrepreneurship and practitioners wanting to enter or extend their market in Asia will also find this volume of immense interest.

South African born Elon Musk is the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. Musk wants to save our planet; he wants to send citizens into space, to form a colony on Mars; he wants to make money while doing these things; and he wants us all to know about it. He is the real-life inspiration for the Iron Man series of films starring Robert Downey Junior. The personal tale of Musk's life comes with all the trappings one associates with a great, drama-filled story. He was a freakishly bright kid who was bullied brutally at school, and abused by his father. In the midst of these rough conditions, and the violence of apartheid South Africa, Musk still thrived academically and attended the University of Pennsylvania, where he paid his own way through school by turning his house into a club and throwing massive parties. He started a pair of huge dot-com successes, including PayPal, which eBay acquired for $1.5 billion in 2002. Musk was forced out as CEO and so began his lost years in which he decided to go it alone and baffled friends by investing his fortune in rockets and electric cars. Meanwhile Musk's marriage disintegrated as his technological obsessions took over his life ... Elon Musk is the Steve Jobs of the present and the future, and for the past twelve months, he has been shadowed by tech reporter, Ashlee Vance. Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of Spacex and Tesla is Shaping our Future is an important, exciting and intelligent account of the real-life Iron Man.

The monograph Actors of Globalization portrays a group of New York businessmen engaged in global trade from 1784 to 1812. It follows their businesses around the world and shows how through wit, flexibility, and the help of a worldwide net of business partners the merchants were able to quickly rise to global entrepreneurs speculating on wars, food crises and slave revolts. The ramifications of their commerce were felt at home, where the merchants invested in land and city development, established new financial institutions and contributed to a rising consumer culture. This book brings together global and local history, arguing that private actors played an important role in the economic and social development of the young United States.

This book, first published in 1982, is a study of the processes that shape the reproduction of the entrepreneurial middle class. It identifies the major dynamics surrounding stages of business growth. More particularly, it focuses upon obstacles and cleavages inherent within the process of small-scale capital accumulation. This book is ideal for students of business and economics.

This book presents key insights about the challenges and the approaches they applied. All companies are featured in 15 teachable case studies - ready to use in entrepreneurship and strategy courses - that represent a broad level of diversity with regard to countries, industries, topics, growth phases, challenges and internationalization strategies.

In the study of entrepreneurship, which has become over the last decade an expanding subject of scholarship there has been little interaction between economists and historians. Most historical studies of entrepreneurship lack a theoretical and comparative approach. For the first time a single volume combines a comparison of eight national experiences, spanning three continents. The chapters written by leading specialists combine historical archive-based work and synthetic theoretic surveys, reflecting the current state and new directions in research.

Interest in the functioning of the human mind can certainly be traced to Plato and Aristotle who often dealt with issues of perceptions and motivations. While the Greeks may have contemplated the human condition, the modern study of the human mind can be traced back to Sigmund Freud (1900) and the psychoanalytic movement. He began the exploration of both conscious and unconscious factors that propelled humans to engage in a variety of behaviors. While Freud's focus may have been on repressed sexuality our focus in this volume lies elsewhere. We are concerned herein with the expression of the cognitions, motivations, passions, intentions, perceptions, and emotions associated with entrepreneurial behaviors. We are attempting in this volume to expand on the work of why entrepreneurs think d- ferently from other people (Baron, 1998, 2004). During the decade of the 1990s the eld of entrepreneurship research seemingly abandoned the study of the entrepreneur. This was the result of earlier research not being able to demonstrate some unique entrepreneurial personality, trait, or char- teristic (Brockhaus and Horwitz, 1986). It was both a naive and simplistic search for the "holy grail" of what made entrepreneurs the way they are. However, many of the researchers in this volume have never gave up the belief that a better und- standing of the mind of the entrepreneur would give us a better understanding of the processes that lead to the creation of new ventures."

Create your dream job by turning your passion into a profitable business.

The business world has completely changed. The old routes to building a successful organization have been entirely revolutionized. In a world which is being transformed with a speed that was unthinkable barely a generation ago, the doors have been thrown wide open to serial entrepreneurs, digital innovators and career reinventors.

In Create Uniqueness, Riccardo Pozzoli, one of Italy's most successful entrepreneurs, and co-founder of the fashion phenomena The Blonde Salad, shares his story about creating a thriving business and building rewarding work environments.

Create Uniqueness is a passionate yet practical guide to identifying a business idea, embracing new ways of working, thinking unusually and building a great company without losing sense of your original idea..

Up-to-date research on the factors which contribute to the build-up of entrepreneurship. This volume provides an international, comparative and historical perspective, with a special focus on Mediterranean countries including Spain, Italy and Greece. The authors take a quantitative approach in their exploration of these, as well as many other countries including England, Scotland and Argentina. Whilst several chapters explore entrepreneurial success as their main dependent variable and study the factors that explain it, others deal with a variety of topics such as education, innovation, immigration, kinship links, the role of investment, geographical factors, and macroeconomic variables.

Providing an important and timely overview of research on the exciting area of entrepreneurship in biotechnology, The Handbook of Bioentrepreneurship examines one of the most promising industries of the 21st century. While genetically engineered food and biopharmaceuticals have made biotechnology part of our everyday life, starting a bioventure is among the most complex and risky entrepreneurial tasks given long development cycles, high technological and market uncertainty, and high capital intensity. Providing unparalleled in-depth and detailed analysis, this Handbook sheds light on business models and strategies, financing, cooperation networks between firms and universities, among other issues. With new developments in biotechnology increasingly in the news, this is an important source for readers interested in public policy, entrepreneurship, and business in the 21st century.

The changing character of the economies in Eastern and Western Europe are leading more people to start their own businesses. This volume, first published in 1987, highlights the trends developing over the closing decades of the twentieth century. Although business start-up requires financial and marketing skills, it also demands important physchological and sociological inputs. On the basis of detailed accounts of the relevant social processes, this volume describes the varied experiences of entrepreneurship as they are emerging among various groups in both Eastern and Western Europe including the unemployed, women, ethnic minorities and others. This book will be of interest to students of business studies and sociology.

These papers provide an ongoing exploration of the major current theoretical and methodological efforts in the fields of entrepreneurship, small and family business growth and firm emergence and growth.

This insightful Handbook focuses on behavior, performance and relationships in small and entrepreneurial firms. It introduces a variety of contemporary topics, research methods and theoretical frameworks that will provide cutting edge analysis, stimulate thought, raise further questions and demonstrate the complexity of the rapidly-advancing field of entrepreneurship.With an extensive introduction, logical sequencing and a collection of interesting and original contributions from across the globe, the Handbook commences with two thought-provoking chapters, which raise issues of theoretical framing and highlight the importance of paradigm choice, methodology and method. After considering different disciplinary approaches to entrepreneurship and small business, various issues are raised about entrepreneurship education and learning and the application of entrepreneurship to various sectors and sectional interests. For example, what conceptual framework is available for entrepreneurs and small businesses? How does innovation relate to entrepreneurship and small business behavior? And what evidence is there of the links between better performing firms and effective learning? These issues are debated before the authors consider the future application of entrepreneurship research to different sectors. Both scholars new to the area, as well as established academics looking to extend their research scope to encompass the field of entrepreneurship and small business will find this work to be an invaluable and timely resource. Contributors: A. Anderson, R. Barrett, B. Bird, J. Broad, J. Byrne, M. Casson, D. Chalmers, E. Chell, A. de Bruin, M. Della Guista, A. Discua Cruz, A. Fayolle, C. Forson, E. Garnsey, W.B. Gartner, S. Gherardi, X. Gu, R. Hanke, R. Holt, J. Howells, C. Howorth, S. Jack, J. Jackson, O. Jones, M. Karatas-Ozkan, M. Kerrin, M. Levesque, S. Lubik, A. Macpherson, S. Mayson, E. McKeever, M. Minniti, M. Ozbilgin, M. Ozturk, F. Patterson, M. Perrotta, L. Pittaway, A. Rauch, L. Schjoedt, E. Shaw, L. Spence, A. Tatli, O. Toutain, C. Yavuz

There is a new business landscape, where companies are increasingly being judged on their ability to generate _social value_. But there is no off-the-shelf solution for the leaders and change makers in this new domain. Creating social value is a journey, and each company must chart its own path through uncertain and complex terrain. We invite you to discover how the entrepreneurial leaders profiled in this book have become trailblazers, using strategy and innovation to generate profits and social value simultaneously.Creating Social Value provides insights into the motivations and preoccupations of groundbreaking entrepreneurial leaders as they look to activate change not just within their companies, but also in their sectors, value chains and even through co-creating partnerships with their competitors. Such change requires fundamentally new styles of leadership and business design where companies seek to be generative rather than extractive.This book also bears witness to the emergence of new language to describe these innovative concepts. Working with and sharing ideas with social entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs inside, the authors became aware of the building blocks of a new lexicon with the power to inspire and positively influence the culture of an organization. Many of the leaders included in this book have driven change by harnessing the power of language to reroute their company's direction.For example, The Campbell Soup Company has created _destination goals_ to describe the long-term vision of the company to nourish its customers, employees and neighbours. Roshan has worked on _nation building_, creating physical infrastructure in Afghanistan, a country decimated by war. UPS has worked to understand its impact on the planet, building a _materiality matrix_ of the issues that matter to its stakeholders, while working to create a culture that fosters social innovation and seeks to understand _constructive dissatisfaction_. Ford is redefining its mission, imagining a different future in which it provides _mobility solutions_, rather than only manufacturing cars. Ford is working with Toyota to co-create technologies to combat climate change.This book sets out a manifesto for Social Value Creation, which is defined as a strategy that combines a unique set of corporate assets (including innovation capacities, marketing skills, managerial acumen, employee engagement, scale) in collaboration with the assets of other sectors and firms to co-create breakthrough solutions to complex economic, social and environmental issues that impact the sustainability of both business and society. Social innovation differs from corporate responsibility in two significant ways: it is strategic and it leverages a wide range of corporate assets and core competencies.Creating Social Value has been designed as a manual for change. It will be essential reading for business students, entrepreneurs and all of those wishing to effect positive, generative change in larger organizations.

Allying and expanding the diverse fields of entrepreneurship and sustainable development research is a modern day imperative. The Handbook of Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Development Research cuts through the different approaches and perspectives of the two fields to point the way ahead for research on sustainable entrepreneurship, outlining the motivation, intentions and impact of ecopreneurs in a local, national and global context. This Handbook paints an illuminating picture of the historic and current understanding of the bond between entrepreneurship and sustainable development. The authors explore the basic contradictions between the two fields and outline the transformative role entrepreneurship can play in achieving sustainable development. 45 expert researchers and their research communities from 16 countries across Europe, Africa, Australia and North America provide original and informative contributions on a variety of issues, from women s empowerment to climate change and organic farmers to ecotourism. With current and authoritative contributions spanning the globe, this Handbook will inspire researchers, teachers and policy-makers to compose their own understanding and contribution on the fast expanding field of entrepreneurship and sustainable development. Contributors: S. Avdeitchikova, F.-M. Belz, K. Berglund, J. Binder, T. Bjerregaard, O. Branzei, B. Cannatelli, T. Ceranic, L. Coenen, M. Dejardin, S. Delgado Calderon, J. Delgado-Ceballos, S. Farny, R. Feola, L.M. Ferri, V. Ferron-Vilchez, S. Gomez-Haro, F. Gribaa, B. Johannisson, A.W. Johansson, G. Keremane, R. Klapper, P. Kyroe, J. Lauring, J. McKay, K. Messeghem, M. Molteni, I. Montiel, J. Nizet, R. Parente, M. Pedrini, K. Poldner, T. Roolaht, E. Rosell, B. Schwartz, M. Sciarelli, E. Sundin, R. Stenberg, M. Tani, M. Tillmar, J.M.de la Toree-Ruiz, A. Tounes, P. Upham, D. Van Dam, Z. Wu