perceptions of the judgement and ability of the coordinator itself may affect
investment decisions. Overall, therefore, the swift trust framework proposed here
appears to allow the accurate identification of different trust types, and appears
to provide the basis for uncovering the interplay between cooperation and
trust in the informal investment decision-making process. By providing a
means for assessing and studying the processes that go towards the formation
of business relationships at the level of entrepreneur, trust theory also provides
a means by which to access the wider social and political processes (in addition
to more specific business, product and market issues) that have remained
relatively untouched by previous studies restricted to firm level analysis ( Scott
and Rosa, 1996 ).

Nevertheless, a number of limitations remain. Although this study has
included some analysis of investor trust in the coordinator, there are two domain
restrictions which restrict our ability to draw general conclusions on the
development of a trust framework for the analysis of the business angel's
informal investment decision-making process. First, the study has been primarily
restricted to one situational domain - the initial screening process - and our
conclusions, therefore, on the nature of trust relations (and on the dominance
of calculus-based trust and entrepreneur competence issues in particular) in this
domain will not necessarily transfer to other domains. While acknowledging that
most informal investment opportunities are rejected at this stage on the basis
of no more detailed examination than the experimental design employed in this
project, it remains important to extend this initial research to other situational
domains in the decision-making process. Second, within this, the present study
is restricted to analysis of trust and cooperation in the context of an investment
opportunity which all but one investor in the sample would have rejected at this
stage. Before concluding on the trust and cooperation factors which come to bear
on the investment decision-making process it will be necessary to extend the
analysis to investigate the propositions developed above, to cover situations where
there is a positive outcome in this domain and the investor decides to pursue
the opportunity to the evaluation stage and a meeting with the principals. Until
these extensions of the research are undertaken, this study, as with others in a
similar vein, provides evidence on the relative importance of the trust-based
factors which lead an investor to reject an opportunity, but not on those which
lead him/her to accept and pursue an interest in that opportunity.

The data reported on in this chapter were collected as part of a study funded by
the Design Council. The authors wish to thank Amy Rogers for assistance in
undertaking the fieldwork and data analysis in connection with that project. They
would also like to thank Stephen Marsh of the National Research Council for
Canada, Ottawa, Bob Hamilton ( University of Canterbury) and Mike Wright

-135-