The aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the evolution of small firm performance. We do so by studying performance changes on a two dimensional "growth– profitability performance space". It is well established that both growth and profitability are important dimensions of...

Principal Topic: Choice of an appropriate business model is essential to the nascent entrepreneurial firm. The term 'business model' describes the collective of the strategies and tactics the firm uses to make money and outlines the underlying economic logic that explains how the firm creates...

Business ventures are started by individuals and teams with very different backgrounds and motivations, pursuing business ideas of very variable inherent quality in environments that also show tremendous variability. As a result it is difficult to arrive at broadly valid generalizations, and...

As one of the participants of the first RENT conference in 1987, and one of those who have stayed in this field of research, I was invited to deliver a keynote address at the 20th anniversary in December, 2006. This short chapter is largely based on that keynote address. What will follow are...

It has been argued that entrepreneurship research has not come far enough, fast enough (Low, 2001). Although the volume of research has grown dramatically, as has the number of specific sub-topics covered, there are relatively few issues on which the entrepreneurship research community has...

The performance of the often young and independent businesses studies in entrepreneurship research is not only difficult to assess (Brush & Vanderwerf, 1992) and hard to predict (Cooper, 1995), but also a challenge to interpret. Is discontinuation a sign of failure, and always a worse outcome...

Increasingly, celebrities engage in business not just as endorsers but also with a financial stake and decision-making role in the business. Whether initiated by the celebrity or by other founders, we refer to such instances of new ventures entering the market with a celebrity engaged in such...

This research examines habitual entrepreneurship as undertaken by those currently creating a new firm and those who recently had. The suggestion is that habitual entrepreneurs have different motivations for firm creation, take different actions during the process, and have different expectations...

Given that the long-term goal is to build a body of generalizable knowledge, so that each specific study does not have to start from scratch, I see a number of problems within the field of entrepreneurship and small business research. It should be stated from the start that the view of the...

Principal Topic The study of the origin and characteristics of venture ideas - or ''opportunities'' as they are often called - and their contextual fit are key research goals in entrepreneurship (Davidsson, 2004). We define venture idea as ''the core ideas of an entrepreneur about what to sell,...