Entrepreneurship

Kirchhoff blends economics, business, and governemnt policy to demonstrate that entrepreneurship's role in business formation and growth energizes and maintains the viability of capitalism. Entrepreneurs convert new ideas into marketable products and services and use these to grab market shares from older, established firms. This process not only produces economic growth, but also redistributes resources so as to assure equitable distribution within society. Acknowledging that this perception is descriptive but lacks predictive power, Kirchhoff offers a typology to assist in predictive theory building and to guide government policy development.

Well managed business incubators with programs and services that help their client companies grow are important mechanisms for economic development in America. Although the number of business incubators in the United States has grown from 10 to 500 in the last 15 years, the success of these incubators has been mixed. Many incubator directors are so busy with public relations, fund raising and administrative duties that they spend very little time working with client companies. Mark Rice and Jana Matthews, incubator experts, have identified three key principles and 10 best practices of successful incubators - those that help entrepreneurs grow their companies. This book provides a litmus test for determining an incubator's feasibility, suggests ways to attract high-quality entrepreneurs, and includes many hands-on examples from some of the country's best business incubators. The authors have developed alternative financial models for incubators, clearly delineated board and staff responsibilities,and outlined many different ways to help entrepreneurs grow their companies, depending on their stage of development.

Entrepreneurs often struggle with many aspects of business: planning and financing company growth, creating a company vision, recruiting, leading, and managing people, as well as personal costs. In Lessons from the Edge, more than 50 business owners and entrepreneurs offer a wealth of real-life stories--in their own words--that provide rare insights about keeping a company healthy and growing. Here is a unique collection of first-person accounts by entrepreneurs who describe their mistakes in business and the lessons they have learned as a result. The stories cover a wide range of experiences from the trials and tribulations of partnerships, to the loss of key customers, theft, finding and retaining employees, and the personal cost of living on the edge. The authors have drawn on interviews with more than 50 entrepreneurs, all of whom are under 45 years of age and are founders or presidents of companies with revenues over $1 million and growing rapidly. They volunteered to share their stories, describing why they lost or almost lost their companies, what they did wrong, and the lessons they have learned. Their narratives are full of mistakes, failure, courage, moments of realization, and timely moves that saved the day. Every company owner will find these accounts insightful, compelling, and occasionally gut wrenching, especially because most face similar challenges and live with the reality that they too could fall off the edge. This instructive and inspiring book brims with lessons for all business owners about courage, persistence, and survival. Lessons from the Edge is an essential read for both established and prospective entrepreneurs.

The book begins with a rich collection of five articles on the nature of entrepreneurship and its relationship to marketing. This may be the single best array of definitional perspectives ever written, in part because leading contributors to the debate have returned to the task. The second section focuses on market opportunity, but rather than only looking at market analysis and idea screening, there is also ground-breaking work regarding entrepreneurial opportunity identification and opportunity recognition. Marketing strategy and each of the marketing mix areas are addressed in separate chapters with particular attention to the uniquenesses of marketing in new enterprises as compared to mature, larger firms. The final section of the book may be the most intriguing, with attention to entrepreneurship in international markets and less developed countries, as well as the role of new and smaller enterprises in job generation. The audiences for this book include marketing, management and entrepreneurship professors, PhD candidates, public policy makers, intellectually curious business owners and others.

Henry Etkowitz's study considers the transformation of the role of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in society as an expanded one involving economic and social development as well as teaching and research.

This volume surveys and reports on the latest developments in entrepreneurship education at the university, secondary, and elementary levels. The contributors explore what works and what doesn't, suggest ways to improve current programs, and propose solutions for areas not adequately covered by existing programs. They issue a call to educators nationwide to recognize the unique characteristics and contributions of entrepreneurs and to reorganize their courses and programs to accommodate, cultivate, and perpetuate the process of entrepreneurship throughout the educational system.

Seizing opportunities, inventing new products, transforming markets - entrepreneurs are an important and well-documented part of the private sector landscape. Do they have counterparts in the public sphere? Mark Schneider, Paul Teske, and Michael Mintrom argue that they do, and test their argument by focusing on agents of dynamic political change in suburbs across the United States, where much of the entrepreneurial activity in American politics occurs. The public entrepreneurs they identify are most often mayors, city managers, or individual citizens. These entrepreneurs develop innovative ideas and implement new service and tax arrangements where existing administrative practices and budgetary allocations prove inadequate to meet a range of problems, from economic development to the racial transition of neighborhoods. How do public entrepreneurs emerge? What do they do? How much does the future of urban development depend on them? Public Entrepreneurs proposes a model for answering these questions, and tests it using data from over 1,000 local governments. The emergence of public entrepreneurs, the authors argue, depends on a set of familiar cost-benefit calculations. Like private sector risk-takers, public entrepreneurs exploit opportunities emerging from imperfect markets for public goods, from collective-action problems that impede private solutions, and from situations where information is costly and the supply of services is uneven. The authors augment their quantitative analysis with ten case studies and show that bottom-up change driven by politicians, public managers, and other local agents obeys regular and predictable rules.

"The chapters in this anthology combine discussion of two currently hot' topics in public administration--privatization and entrepreneurship. . . . Perhaps the most attractive aspect of this book is that it is not merely an unbridled emotional paean to privatization and entrepreneurship but an objective introduction to these issues. The editor selects an array of essays that address not only theory and practice but also the pragmatic issues and problems associated with implementing these new policy initiatives. This book would be a welcome addition to libraries wishing to remain current with the expanding literature on privatization and entrepreneurship." Choice

"This book takes a close look at the contribution of small firms to the U.S. economy and at the contrasts between traditional development policies and those often recommended to help the small enterprise. The book offers systematic guidelines that will assist economic developers, policy makers, and private citizens in their efforts to promote entrepreneurship and assure sound economic development at local and state levels." Recent Publications on Governmental Problems

"Russel Taylor captures the entrepreneurial essence and risk-taking instincts that set apart the 15 women he has picked to profile in this highly enjoyable book. Executives of both sexes will find unique explanations of the success achieved by these dynamic ladies. Read it. You'll like it. And you'll learn from it." Roy Rowan, Author of The Intuitive Manager

Disclosing New Worlds calls for a recovery of a way of being that has always characterized human life at its best. The book argues that human beings are at their best not when they are engaged in abstract reflection, but when they are intensely involved in changing the taken-for-granted, everyday practices in some domain of their culture -- that is, when they are making history. History-making, in this account, refers not to wars and transfers of political power, but to changes in the way we understand and deal with ourselves. The authors identify entrepreneurship, democratic action, and the creation of solidarity as the three major arenas in which people make history, and they focus on three prime methods of history-making -- reconfiguration, cross-appropriation, and articulation.