Comparative Entrepreneurship Initiatives

This book investigates entrepreneurial initiatives in the three largest economies of the world: China, Japan and the USA. It brings together historical, institutional, and ethnographic approaches and highlights entrepreneurial patterns that result from cultural, legal, and political forces that facilitate and constrain entrepreneurship.

This book systematically compares the innovation and entrepreneurship education (IEE) in the United States, the United Kingdom, Finland, Germany, Croatia, Canada, South Korea, and China. The book invites the most distinguished professors of each country in this field to contribute. It provides a context analysis that can lead to greater insight into why and how IEE has become an important government agenda and an institutional priority in different country settings. Following the context, each chapter analyzes governmental policies and the guidance of entrepreneurship education in recent years. This book also analyzes the internal development and supporting system of IEE from an ecosystem perspective. Based on the comparison of case countries, the book puts forwards the common successful experience and the differentiation of IEE.

The renowned group of international contributors to this book provide analysis of where and how gender plays a role in the entrepreneurial ecosystem. 11 essays examine how ecosystems influence women entrepreneurs and how women entrepreneurs influence their local ecosystems, both cross-nationally and through in-depth country studies.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Sociology - Individual, Groups, Society, grade: 1,3, LMU Munich (Fakultät für Betriebswirtschaft), course: ABWL, language: English, abstract: In September 2006, the OECD launched a major initiative dedicated to establishing internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants (OECD 2006). This highlights the importance of several aspects. 1. The impact of entrepreneurial activity in societies is manifold and critical to the economical success of nations. 2. The role of entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly significant with regard to the development of international businesses in a global market environment. 3. From a scientific point of view, entrepreneurship is gaining evermore attention from scholars of various disciplines. As A review of literature suggests, various socio-cultural elements determine entrepreneurial activity across countries. Yet, in spite of its economic and social significance, domestic venture creation rates - in international comparison - vary significantly. Relying on the definition of entrepreneurship as the “creation of new enterprise” (Low & MacMillan 1988, p.141) this thesis assesses the various linkages between national culture and domestic entrepreneurial activity. At first, a recap of historical entrepreneurship theory leads to the identification of some fundamental aspects. At the same time, it is found that individual-level factors play a central role. These personal factors are then examined further, relying on entrepreneurial psychology theory and deriving a set of cross-nationally valid socio-cultural antecedents to entrepreneurial activity. Incorporating an anthropological perspective, a subsequent analysis of recent empirical findings examines the impact of differences in national cultural values on domestic entrepreneurial activity. Accordingly, domestic entrepreneurial activity may be influenced by national culture through direct as well as moderating effects, represented by the impact by differences in national cultural values on entrepreneurial orientation as well as on entrepreneurial cognition (Mueller & Thomas 2000; Thomas & Mueller 2000; Mitchell et al. 2000, 2002). Eventually, findings are integrated to a common theoretical framework that draws a holistic picture of the various associations between national culture and domestic entrepreneurial activity. The generated model allows some valuable implications for academia to further research the complex interaction between national culture and the various phenomena of entrepreneurial activity.

Without a clear and organized view of where and how entrepreneurship manifests itself, policy makers have been left in uncharted waters without an analytical compass. The purpose of this book is to provide such an analytical compass for directing how public policy can shape and promote entrepreneurship. We do this in two ways. The first is to provide a framework for policymakers and scholars to understand what determines entrepreneurship. The second is to apply this framework to a series of cases, or country studies. In particular, this book seeks to answer three questions about entrepreneurship: What has happened over time? Why did it happen? And, what has been the role of government policy? The cornerstone of the book is the proposed Eclectic Theory of Entrepreneurship. The goal of the Eclectic Theory is to provide a unified framework for understanding and analyzing the determinants of entrepreneurship. The Eclectic Theory of entrepreneurship integrates the different strands from relevant fields into a unifying, coherent framework. At the heart of the Eclectic Theory is the integration of factors shaping the demand for entrepreneurship on the one hand, with those influencing the supply of entrepreneurs on the other hand. The key to understanding the role of public policy is through identifying those channels shifting either the demand for or the supply of entrepreneurship by policy instruments. The findings in this book show that, by utilizing the framework provided by the Eclectic Theory of Entrepreneurship, it is within the grasp of policymakers to identify the determinants of entrepreneurship in a particular country setting at a particular point in time. This will be essential in formulating new public policies to promote entrepreneurship and, ultimately, economic growth, job creation and international competitiveness.

This book explores the importance of entrepreneurs in driving economic growth as the world economy grows and becomes more integrated and more challenging. It examines the situation in both advanced and developing countries and shows how the entrepreneurial orientation of the founders of small and medium sized enterprises has resulted in phenomenal growth, often fuelled by innovation and new technologies. It contrasts the experiences of Chinese family business in China and among the overseas Chinese with the experiences of family businesses in the United States and Europe. One important conclusion is that there has been a noticeable fall in entrepreneurial proclivity in the advanced economies, in contrast to the position in emerging economies.

Over the last several decades there has been a growing interest in the relationship between entrepreneurship and university-industry collaboration, namely how such cooperation can benefit entrepreneurship development at individual, national, and regional levels. While there are several refereed journal articles on different aspects of university-industry cooperation, most studies dwell primarily on instruments such as spin-offs, incubators and graduate entrepreneurs. This collection offers the first book-length compendium of international comparative perspectives on university-industry cooperation. Entrepreneurship and Knowledge Exchange explores insights from a wide variety of countries of relevance to researchers as well as policy and decision makers, especially those working in developing economies. Seminal contributions from top academics in the field, such as Alan Gibb, Peter Scott, and Mary Walshok, are included. The issues of knowledge transfer, entrepreneurship, and regional/national economic regeneration have inspired countless programs and initiatives at national and regional levels, and the chapters in this book examine these initiatives, providing both a reference work and a record of practical experience.