Business angels are recognized as playing a key role in financing the start-up and early stages of new ventures. However, our knowledge of how business angels operate remains limited and highly fragmented. This Handbook provides a synthesis of research on business angels. It adopts an international perspective to reflect the spread of angel investing around the world. The increasing number of government initiatives to promote angel investing is also reflected in the book with an assessment of the most common support schemes. Adopting an international focus, the expert group of contributors examine business angels themselves; the evolution of the market; the various stages of the investment process and the role of public policy in influencing angel investment. They each conclude their chapters with an agenda for future research on business angels. Students and scholars of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial finance, and related subjects will find this book to be an invaluable resource to their work.In particular, they will benefit from the research agendas that that concludes each chapter This Handbook will also be of interest to policy-makers and other practitioners looking to enhance their understanding of the design and need for such interventions. Contributors include: F.M. Amatucci, M. Atienza, S. Avdeitchikova, T. Botelho, C. Carpentier, V. Collewaert, L. Hornuf, H. Keinonen, T. Lahti, H. Landstroem, D. Lingelbach, M. Liu, C. Mason, A. Maxwell, D. Politis, G. Romani, W. Scheela, A. Schwienbacher, J.-M. Suret, R. Sorheim, Y. Tan, J. Wang

This remarkable book outlines the historical framework and the main concepts of the literature on industrial districts. It illustrates a new approach to the study of industrial development, based on well-known industrial districts analysis. Giacomo Becattini has written an authoritative volume which, starting with the theory of districts, explores key aspects of contemporary capitalism. The book concludes that industrial districts are not a provisory phenomenon but a variant of the capitalist mode of production, where financial relationships are relatively less important, and inter-human ones play an unusually important role. Such is the basis for their specific competitive advantage. Academics, politicians and students interested in local development and also industrial development will find much to learn in Industrial Districts, as will industrial geographers and historians of industry and of economic thought.

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences and law, expertly written by the world's leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas. In this unique and original Advanced Introduction, Robert Hisrich pinpoints the essential principles of forging a new venture in an existing corporate context. In this environment, starting and operating a new business includes considerable risk and requires effort to overcome inertia to create something new of value both to the organization as well as to the market and the individuals. This accessible and practical guide to the nature of the entrepreneurial process discusses the basic aspects of corporate venturing before diving into topics such as innovation, creativity, opportunity analysis, market disruption, and the critical development of business plans. The result is an applicable illustration of how an individual might organize, control and effectively implement a corporate venture, including methods for evaluating results and using creative problem solving. This highly readable guide will be an invaluable text and resource for students of entrepreneurship, strategy and innovation.

This book embodies the ever-increasing scope and depth of empirical entrepreneurship research in Europe. Contributors from different disciplinary backgrounds within the business field - including finance, management, and entrepreneurship, and from other related disciplines such as economics and economic geography - employ various methodologies to study the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. Drawing on this wealth of theoretically based and empirically sound research, the contributors examine three overarching themes. First, entrepreneurship issues in specific country settings are discussed: these encompass Portugal, the UK and Germany in Western Europe, Eastern European countries such as Russia and Latvia, and then Scandinavia and Finland. Second, special issues concerning technology-based companies are explored, and finally, unique aspects of venture capital markets in Europe are studied. Presenting cutting edge empirical research on myriad entrepreneurship topics in Europe, this multidisciplinary volume will strongly appeal to academics, students and researchers from various backgrounds that have a specific interest in entrepreneurship.It will also be warmly welcomed by entrepreneurs themselves.

Dyson has become a byword for great design, brilliant invention and global success. Now, James Dyson, the entrepreneur who made it all happen, tells his remarkable and inspirational story in Invention: A Life of Learning through Failure. 'By continually challenging ourselves, investing in the future and experimenting, we can continue to make the future. We must never stop. Never, for one second become comfortable.' James Dyson In this spirited autobiography, James Dyson interweaves his own life story with a wider exploration of the importance of invention. On the way, the reader encounters challenging and inspirational characters, radical inventions, adventurous engineering, cultural fads, political gamesmanship, legal battles and much else besides. Invention: A Life of Learning through Failure is a 21st century call to arms: creative invention through the research, design and manufacture of technologies and products empowers not only employees and employers, but the economy at large, while the very acts of imagining, shaping and making things enriches our lives. James Dyson sees people as producers as well as consumers, the inventing and making of things part of a natural instinct. Invention is a lifelong commitment. It has been James Dyson's life.

This expansive and practical Handbook introduces the methods currently used to increase the understanding of the usefulness and versatility of a systematic approach to qualitative research in entrepreneurship. It fills a crucial gap in the literature on entrepreneurship theory, and, just as importantly, illustrates how these principles and techniques can be appropriately and fruitfully employed. The Handbook is underpinned by the belief that qualitative research has the potential to charter hitherto unexplored waters in the field of entrepreneurship and thus contribute significantly to its further advancement. The contributors seek to assist entrepreneurship researchers in making more informed choices and designing more rigorous and sophisticated studies. They achieve this by providing concrete examples of research experiences and tangible 'how to' advice. By clarifying what these research methods entail, how they are currently being used and how they can be evaluated, this Handbook constitutes a comprehensive and highly accessible methodological toolbox. Dealing with both well-accepted qualitative approaches and lesser-known, rarer and more novel approaches to the study of entrepreneurship, this Handbook will be invaluable to those studying, researching and teaching entrepreneurship.

This fascinating and original textbook - an excellent introductory text for both graduate and undergraduate students - attempts to enhance and advance our understanding of entrepreneurship. In this intriguing book, Bjorn Bjerke contends that entrepreneurship cannot, to any great extent, be planned in advance. He goes as far as to suggest that planning could be against the very essence of entrepreneurship. The book explains that entrepreneurship is about courage rather than willpower, is to be venturesome and undertaking whilst experimenting, networking and pushing oneself forward, and concerns exploiting mistakes as essential learning curves. The importance of the entrepreneur as a human being is strongly expressed, as is the idea that entrepreneurship is closer to art and aesthetics than science and mathematics. Language, argues the author, plays a decisive role and philosophy provides a solid basis when we try to come to grips with the nature of entrepreneurship. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Bjorn Bjerke asserts that all these points alert us to one simple fact: it is not possible to define a 'typical' entrepreneur or to present a model method of operating and supporting an entrepreneurial venture. Understanding Entrepreneurship is a truly remarkable textbook that will provide an absorbing and illuminating read for all those - academics, students and practitioners alike - with an interest in entrepreneurship.

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) often have difficulty competing in the global economy unless they collaborate with domestic or foreign partners or with public sector organizations. This book addresses the resource leverage and innovation challenges that increased global trade represents for SMEs. In doing so, it explores how SMEs can become more competitive at home and in foreign markets as stand-alone firms or as members of supplier and customer networks. SMEs are turning increasingly to innovation as a source of competitive advantage in order to protect their home markets and participate in expanding foreign markets. The contributors to this volume - leading experts in entrepreneurship, innovation, and international business - provide in-depth coverage of the most compelling issues facing SMEs. These include: innovation as a competitive strategy, network dynamics, ways to leverage technology, internationalization, and the role of the public sector in helping SMEs to overcome resource deficiencies. This comprehensive look at SMEs in the global marketplace will be of great interest to academics who study entrepreneurship, innovation, or international business, officials from public sector agencies with responsibility for helping SMEs to internationalize and become more innovative, and senior executives of SMEs or executives of larger companies who are considering collaboration with SMEs.

Is social capital the 'missing link' in economics? In this vital new book, the authors argue that the 'forgotten' production factor of social capital is as crucial in economic decision-making as the other more traditional factors of production such as physical, financial and human capital. They attempt to bridge the gap between theory and reality by examining the main factors that determine entrepreneurship, co-operative movements and the creation and destruction of social capital. To address the question of how social capital is created and destroyed, the authors develop an interdisciplinary approach combining political science, economics, anthropology, sociology and history. They show how bridging social capital enforces personal contact and acts as a lubricator for human co-operation, whereas bonding social capital enforces distance between people, increasing mistrust and, consequently, transaction costs. They demonstrate how entrepreneurship can facilitate voluntary collective action and create inclusive forms of social capital. Crucial in this respect is that entrepreneurs are motivated not only by economic incentives but also by social motives. Applying historical and contemporary case studies, they identify the serious human and economic consequences that result when social capital is disregarded. The authors believe that the implications of such a discovery demand a re-evaluation of traditional economic theory. This book will contribute substantially to academic and popular debates on social capital and will be an invaluable source of reference for all social scientists. It will particularly appeal to students and scholars of public policy, economics, sociology, political science, anthropology and history.

In this book, Sigvald Harryson demonstrates how to use know-who based networking to increase knowledge whilst reducing complexity. He reveals new synergies between external and internal knowledge networking that promise to enhance the innovation performance of any transitional, transnational company. The book develops and builds upon knowledge in the interconnected areas of entrepreneurship and networking across different levels and units of analysis. In-depth studies of a wealth of absolute best practice companies are explored, illustrating how concrete management practices can be established to acquire and then transform science into sales in more time- and cost-efficient ways. A unique framework is developed to overcome the dichotomies between knowledge creation and business implementation. Through this, the author provides the necessary foundations from which profitable growth through innovation (GTI) can be developed: * Identification and analysis of the most important barriers to entrepreneurship * Enabling factors and intelligence processes required for forceful innovation * A GTI process for application in practice. Know-Who Based Entrepreneurship shows that the knowledge and innovation process is no longer limited to intracorporate know-how, but has now expanded to encompass global know-how. It will thus be invaluable to business managers, international scholars and researchers of R&D, innovation, entrepreneurship and the knowledge economy.

MNEs have been involved in Thai manufacturing since the early 1960s but despite this significant involvement their role in the industrialization process remains a controversial issue. This book has three main foci: to evaluate the impact of MNE involvement in Thai manufacturing to gain insight into the principal mechanisms by which MNEs contribute to the industrialization process and obstacles that prevent them from functioning more effectively to recommend policies for maximising the benefits from MNE involvement. The key hypothesis proposed by the author is that gains from MNE involvement are conditioned by the policy environment of the host country. The scope of MNE involvement studies uniquely covers not only FDI but also non-FDI. The study also draws together valuable conclusions and outlines policy lessons for other developing countries. Multinational Enterprises and Industrial Transformation will appeal to post-graduate and advanced undergraduate students in subject areas of international economics, industrial organization, economic growth, development economics and Asian economic development. Professional economists, policy makers and researchers working on industrial organization, international capital mobility and economic growth issues in developing countries will also find much to engage them within the book.

This book investigates the antecedents and consequences of information technology adoption among small and medium sized enterprises.Following the well publicized 'Internet bubble', the rate of adoption of such technologies - especially of Internet-based solutions - has slowly changed among small firms, leading to a very mixed picture. Whilst a significant number of these small firms are still excluded from such technologies, others show very complex patterns of adoption and implementation. What is the reason for these differences, and do they explain performance heterogeneity among small firms? Andrea Ordanini addresses these questions by formulating various models of information technology adoption and its impact on marketing and procurement processes. The models are then tested on a sample of 700 small organizations. Their results provide various implications for managers and present suggestions for policy makers wishing to improve the effective use of information technologies within small firms. This book will strongly appeal to researchers, academics and students with an interest in business and management, entrepreneurship, technology and innovation. Entrepreneurs, managers, consultants and policy institutions interested in promoting technology diffusion among SMEs will also find the book to be of great interest.

Recent research on the economics of innovation has acknowledged the importance of path dependence and networks in the evolution of economies and the diffusion of new techniques, products, and processes. These are topics pioneered by Paul A. David, one of the world's leading scholars in the economics of innovation. This outstanding collection provides a fitting tribute to the diversity and depth of Paul David's contributions. The papers included range from simulation models of the evolution of market structure in the presence of innovation, through historical investigations of knowledge networks and empirical analysis of contemporary networks, to the analysis of the diffusion of innovations using simulation and analytic models and of the diffusion of knowledge using patent data. With an emphasis on simulation models, data analysis, and historical evidence, this book will be required reading for researchers in innovation economics and regional development as well as economists, sociologists, and historians of innovation and intellectual property.

Tackling innovation as an endogenous process, this groundbreaking new book builds upon the Schumpeterian creative response by implementing the tools of complexity economics. This reappraisal of the Schumpeterian legacy allows the author to apply complexity economics to endogenous knowledge externalities and consequently move away from the Darwinistic and biological accounts of evolutionary economics. This approach proves that firms, in out-of-equilibrium conditions, try and react by means of introducing innovations. The success of this reaction is contingent upon access conditions to knowledge externalities. Cristiano Antonelli demonstrates that the consequent introduction of innovations may, in turn, knock firms further out of equilibrium and cause positive changes in the system's properties that feed the introduction of further innovations. In addition, this can also engender the decline of the system's properties and push firms to adaptive response that drive the system towards an equilibrium without growth and change. This path dependent loop of interactions between the system properties and the individual actions of firms is central to this book. Paving the way to a new phase of evolutionary economics, the book's prime readership will be students and scholars who study and teach evolutionary economics, the economics of innovation and/or the economics of growth.

Women and Entrepreneurship is a careful selection of the most significant previously published material which has been influential in shaping the field of women's entrepreneurship. The volume presents early works which laid the foundations first asking whether women entrepreneurs were different, exploring issues about women entrepreneurs and their businesses and delving into more specific questions on individual, organizational, and environmental matters. An organizing framework connects the works from theory to the conceptual categories of human capital, including personal cognition and goals, social capital, financial capital, strategic choice, performance, outcomes and environment. The volume provides a comprehensive introduction for any researcher entering this field of study and illustrates those areas where additional research is greatly needed.

This unique reference book provides an array of diverse perspectives on international entrepreneurship, a new and emerging field of research that blends concepts and methodologies from more traditional social sciences. The Handbook includes chapters written by top researchers of economics and sociology, as well as academic leaders in the fields of entrepreneurship and international business. State-of-the-art contributions provide up-to-date literature reviews, making this book essential for the researcher of entrepreneurship and the internationalisation of entrepreneurs.

Despite a wealth of efforts that examine separately the role entrepreneurs and universities play in economic development, no systematic effort has been made to examine the role universities play in promoting economic development through entrepreneurship. This book fills that gap, focusing on policy aspects of government-university partnerships with a discussion both of best practices and problematic strategies. The book begins by tracing the history of American government-university-industry partnerships that have promoted economic development. In succeeding chapters, well-known scholars focus on linkages in different domains such as: technology transfer, innovation networks, brain drain, cluster-based planning, and manufacturing. Practitioner commentaries follow many of the chapters in order to present an evaluation of the arguments from the perspective of someone directly involved in the fostering of these relationships. Non-technical and accessible in nature, the chapters summarize existing knowledge and research in order to help policymakers, foundations, university officials, business leaders and other stakeholders create and enhance partnerships between universities and governments that encourage economic development through entrepreneurship.

The capitalist economies of the developed world fall loosely into two highly divergent camps: one in which securities markets are robust and the ownership of large firms is broadly dispersed; the other in which securities markets are weak and ownership is highly concentrated. There is now a lively debate about the role of law in producing these diverse patterns. This volume brings together the foundational contributions to that debate, edited and introduced by one of the key participants. They are a must read for anyone who wishes to understand the relationship between law and the economic structure of modern societies.' - Henry Hansmann, Yale Law School, US 'Mark Roe, one of the world's leading corporate law scholars, here presents a collection of first rate work (including his own) that addresses the deepest puzzle in comparative corporate governance: why is it that stock ownership patterns differ so significantly across countries, even where the stage of economic development is comparable? This volume will be of genuine value to scholars and students interested in comparative political economy as well as corporate law.' - Jeffrey N. Gordon, Columbia Law School, US This insightful volume explores the issue of why some nations have deep securities markets while others do not, and investigates the new hope that securities markets could be the road to wealth and not just the result of it. This collection of key articles, together with the editor's comprehensive introduction, examines the recently emergent theories in the field.

Research suggests that an increasing number of people experience organisational changes such as mergers and acquisitions as highly emotional life events. Indeed, given that, as the authors prove, 70% of all mergers and acquisitions fail to reach their initial goals largely because of neglected people issues, it is a must for every manager and M&A researcher to understand the emotional side of such change processes. This fascinating book explains how managerial behaviour and communication styles influence the emotions of employees and affect their readiness to contribute to a successful post-merger integration. It combines emotion theories from other disciplines with recent M&A findings, and offers practical implications through illustrative case studies. Academics and practitioners will find the combination of management literature with psychology and sociology literature of great interest.

Political Entrepreneurship explores the role of political entrepreneurs in regional growth and entrepreneurial diversity. The authors define a political entrepreneur as a politician, bureaucrat or officer within the publicly funded sector who encourages entrepreneurship for growth and employment using innovative approaches. This book aims to enrich the established research on entrepreneurship with in-depth knowledge of the conditions conducive for political entrepreneurship in Sweden. Political entrepreneurs have the potential to be innovative and encourage entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial diversity by fundamentally challenging the prevailing formal and informal institutions. It is argued that, in times of economic stress, political entrepreneurship is essential to find new ways of promoting growth, employment and welfare. By using social science and economics perspectives, this study complements the dominant business administration research on entrepreneurship by increasing our knowledge of the economic and political contexts in which entrepreneurship and private enterprise is conducted. This book is essential reading for students, researchers and policymakers interested in politics, economics and entrepreneurship, as well as for those working in the public sector. Contributors include: D.E. Andersson, S. Andersson, A.E. Andersson, P. Assmo, C. Berggren, T. Bromander, C. Karlsson, M. Nilsson, C. Silander, D. Silander, P. Stroemblad, M.-L. von Bergmann-Winberg, Y. von Friedrichs, E. Wihlborg

The authors of this comprehensive study address why it is that some small firms perform well and others don't, and whether high-performing firms share characteristics that distinguish them from low-performing firms. By exploring bundles of resources and their interaction with other factors, the authors explain important small business outcomes such as growth, performance, entrepreneurial activity, and the chance of receiving debt or equity capital. The authors find that while resources may be valuable, it is essential that small businesses have the processes to facilitate the manipulation of resources into value-creating strategies. Rather than reaching the conclusion that more is always better, the authors tease out the conditions under which certain resources are particularly valuable, as well as the conditions under which these and other resources are less valuable. The resource factors examined range from aspects of the human capital of the small business manager, such as length of education or prior experience with business start-ups, to social capital variables and firm-level resources, such as access to financial capital and competence. Representing leading-edge research across several levels of analysis, this volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students of entrepreneurship and small business, as well as for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Policymakers will find the volume helpful in understanding the effect policies may have on small businesses and the subsequent impact on the economic performance of a region.