Innovation And Small Business Volume 1

Utilizing a unique data set, Zoltan Acs and David Audretsch provide a rich empirical analysis of the increased importance of small firms in generating technological innovations and their growing contribution to the U.S. economy. They identify the contributions made by both small and large firms to the innovative process and the manner in which market structure, and the firm-size distribution in particular, responds to technological change. The authors' analysis relies on traditional theories of industrial organization and tests existing hypotheses, many of them previously untested due to data constraints. Innovation and Small Firms brings together two large data bases recently released by the U. S. Small Business Administration - one directly measuring innovative activity for large and small firms, the other providing a detailed census of economic activity for all manufacturing firms and plants across a broad spectrum of industries. Acs and Audretsch describe and evaluate the data bases in the context of the literature on innovation, market structure, and firm size. They present their findings on the presence of small firms, small-firm entry in manufacturing, small-firm growth and flexible technology, and mobility and firm size. They compare static and dynamic measures of small-firm viability and address the relationships between R&D, innovation, and productivity, and analyze the interaction between technological regimes and the role of government in innovation.

This informative book provides a critical and comprehensive review of the research on innovation in small businesses particularly, the family-owned businesses. Innovation in Small Family Businesses explores how innovation is developed and carried out in small family-owned businesses, the factors underpinning it, and the innovation drivers and barriers in these firmsÕ context. Sylvie Laforet also offers suggestions on how innovation can be fostered and perhaps, sustained in small family-owned businesses and discusses the governmentÕs role in this. The book makes an important contribution to the theoretical development of family firmsÕ and small businessesÕ innovation. The detailed and critical literature review will provide useful reference points for both academics and students and identifies avenues for future research for the area. Policymakers and practitioners will also find this compact compendium insightful.

The authors here discuss the factors that should be taken into account when starting up a new business. However, a key factor of this book is the emphasis on the learning and decision-making processes of entrepreneurs.

Since the pioneering work scholars such as Joseph Schumpeter and Peter Drucker, the fields of innovation and entrepreneurship have evolved to become two separate and distinct disciplines. Schumpeter 1 focused on the contributions of entrepreneurial startups and smaller firms, whereas Schumpeter 2 emphasized the role of formal research, development and industrial innovation in larger firms. Unfortunately, the study and practice of each field has suffered as a result: entrepreneurship has become preoccupied with individual entrepreneurs and small business creation, and innovation is dominated by corporate R&D and new product development. Promoting Innovation in New Ventures and Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) aims to bridge these two fields by examining innovation in new ventures and SMEs. This book identifies themes which can reunite the study and practice of entrepreneurship and innovation by examining a potentially bridging phenomenon. The focus here is on high growth, innovative SMEs, and the interactions between SMEs and larger organizations, private and public. It is organized around three overlapping themes: SME innovation performance, practices and networks. Contents: Introduction (Joe Tidd)SME Innovation and Performance: Innovation and Growth in the city Region: Microeconomic Evidence of Asymmetries (David Devins, George Lodorfos, Ioannis Kostopoulos and Don Webber)Innovation and Organizational Size in Irish SMES: An Empirical Study (Rodney McAdam, Renee S Reid and David A Gibson)Effects of Product Innovation and Organizational Capabilities on Competitive Advantage: Evidence from UK Small and Medium Manufacturing Enterprises (Ana Christina O Siqueira and Andy D Cosh)Intellectual Capital, Innovation and Performance: Empirical Evidence from SMEs (Karl-Heinz Leitner)Fast-Growing SMEs and the Role of Innovation (Christina Grundström, Roland Sjöström, Anders Uddenberg and Anna Öhrwall Rönnbäck)Perceived Competition and Innovative Intentions in Dutch Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (Jeroen P J De Jong)The Impact of Environmental Uncertainty Dimensions on Organizational Innovativeness: An Empirical Study on SMEs (Cevahir Uzkurt, Rachna Kumar, Halil Semih Kimzan and Hanife Sert)SME Practices for Innovation: A Model of Organizational Innovation Implementation Effectiveness in Small to Medium Firms (Sukanlaya Sawang and Kerrie L Unsworth)A Study of Organizational Determinants and Innovation Practices in Dubai SMEs (Yahya Al-Ansari, Jun Xu and Simon Pervan)Perspectives on Innovation Management of Ecuadorian Companies: Empirical Evidence (Guillermo Javier Diaz-Villavicencio, Simone Didonet and Alexander Dodd)The Relationship between Top Management Team Innovation Orientation and Firm Growth: The Mediating Role of Firm Innovativeness (Nils D Kraiczy, Andreas Hack, Franz W Kellermanns)Organizational Learning, Non-Technical Innovation and Customer Satisfaction of SMEs (Dimitrios Kafetzopoulos and Evangelos Psomas)What's Small Size Got to do with it? Protection of Intellectual Assets in SMEs (Heidi Olander, Pia Hurmelinna-Laukkanen and Jukka Mahonen)SME Networks for Open Innovation: Governance of Innovation and Growth in SME Networks (Tove Brink)Knowledge Inflows from Market- and Science-Based Actors, Absorptive Capacity, Innovation and Performance: A Study of SMEs (Graciela Corral de Zubielqui, Janice Jones and Laurence Lester)Understanding Relationships between Universities and SMEs in Emerging High Technology Industries: The Case of Opto-Electronics (Chris Hendry, Ja

From the cofounder of Square, an inspiring and entertaining account of what it means to be a true entrepreneur and what it takes to build a resilient, world-changing company In 2009, a St. Louis glassblowing artist and recovering computer scientist named Jim McKelvey lost a sale because he couldn't accept American Express cards. Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. With no expertise or experience in the world of payments, they approached the problem of credit cards with a new perspective, questioning the industry's assumptions, experimenting and innovating their way through early challenges, and achieving widespread adoption from merchants small and large. But just as Square was taking off, Amazon launched a similar product, marketed it aggressively, and undercut Square on price. For most ordinary startups, this would have spelled the end. Instead, less than a year later, Amazon was in retreat and soon discontinued its service. How did Square beat the most dangerous company on the planet? Was it just luck? These questions motivated McKelvey to study what Square had done differently from all the other companies Amazon had killed. He eventually found the key: a strategy he calls the Innovation Stack. McKelvey's fascinating and humorous stories of Square's early days are blended with historical examples of other world-changing companies built on the Innovation Stack to reveal a pattern of ground-breaking, competition-proof entrepreneurship that is rare but repeatable. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems--one crazy idea at a time.

"This book contributes to the understanding, improving and strengthening of entrepreneurial development, and innovation's role in family businesses and SMEs by providing both theoretical and applied knowledge in order to find how and why entrepreneurship and innovation can produce inefficient and dysfunctional outcomes"--

In this extended and novel entrepreneurial analysis of small firm inception and growth, a leading authority in the field develops a new kind of ‘micro-micro’ analysis, applying rigorous methods from economics, accounting and finance to gain a deeper understanding of micro-firms, examining performance, hierarchy, capital structure, monitoring and control, flexibility, innovation, and information systems.