entrepreneurship

Michigan Universities Join Forces for $75M Entrepreneurship Initiative

A consortium of Michigan’s 15 public universities recently announced a decade-long initiative to launch 200 new businesses in the state. The Michigan Initiative for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MIIE) plans to raise and distribute $75 million over the next seven years through grants for commercialization projects, university-industry partnerships and entrepreneurship education.

Recent Research: Profiling U.S. Tech & Engineering Entrepreneurs

The under-30 crowd may be the early adopters of many of the new gadgets in our lives - and the young techies who quickly became billionaires producing those toys may grab all the headlines - but a new study reveals most U.S.-born technology and engineering company founders are actually middle-aged, well educated and hold degrees from a wide assortment of universities.
 

Evidence on entrepreneurs in the United States: Data from the 1989–2004 Survey of Consumer Finances

Using data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the authors examine characteristics of entrepreneurs and the businesses they run. Their analysis confirms that business owners are important sources of saving and wealth creation in the U.S. and that they are less risk averse than other wealthy households. This discounts the notion that the wealth of entrepreneurs disproportionately reflects a buildup of precautionary balances to guard against financial risk.

Performance Differentials between Diversifying Entrants and Entrepreneurial Start-Ups: A Complexity Approach

The authors investigate the relationship between firms entry characteristics and their subsequent performance contingent on environmental turbulence and stage of industry life cycle by simulating industry as an NKC landscape. Diversifying entrants differ from entrepreneurial startups in terms of the complexity of their routines. They posit that diversifying entrants outperform the entrepreneurial start-ups when the turbulence is high. Further, learning - possible in the later industry stages - disproportionately favors the entrepreneurial start-ups.

The Process of Creative Construction: Knowledge Spillovers, Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth

Questioning the underlying assumptions of the process of creative destruction, the authors conceptualize an alternative process of creative construction that may characterize the dynamics between entrants and incumbents. They discuss the underlying mechanism of knowledge spillover strategic entrepreneurship whereby knowledge investments by existing organizations, when coupled with entrepreneurial action by individuals embedded in their context, results in new venture creation, heterogeneity in performance and subsequent growth in industries, regions and economies.