Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics: The Process of Business Creation

"This important Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics reports on the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), the most comprehensive scientifically representative study to date of nascent entrepreneurs. The book is unique because the study identified individuals in the process of creating new businesses to understand how, at its very source, people move from considering the option of starting a new business to its actual founding.  This has never been done before in the history of entrepreneurship research… I cannot recommend this book more strongly to entrepreneurship scholars and those interested in where entrepreneurs come from and how they move from their initial idea to new venture founding."                                              
--Claudia Bird Schoonhoven,  University of California, Irvine 

"This Handbook makes a terrific contribution to understanding entrepreneurship and new business creation.  Its 38 chapters report major findings from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), an unprecedented research program involving more than a hundred researchers from 10 countries.  This Handbook is ′must reading′ for anyone interested in entrepreneurship research."         
--Andrew H. Van de Ven, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota

Entrepreneurial activity provides profound positive benefits across an important set of measures of social and economic well-being, much of it concentrated in new economic sectors such as information technology. Yet, even though entrepreneurship has been shown to provide many benefits, it is surprising that there has not been a systematic study of the entrepreneurial process. The Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics: The Process of Business Creation fills this gap by offering theories, ideas, and measures that can be used to explore and understand the factors that encompass and influence the creation of new businesses.

The chapters in the handbook provide the rationale for questionnaires used in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED). The PSED is a research program that was initiated to provide systematic, reliable, and generalizable data on important features of the new business creation process. The PSED includes information on the proportion and characteristics of the adult population involved in efforts to start businesses, the activities and characteristics that comprise the nature of the business start-up process, and the proportion and characteristics of those business start-up efforts that actually become new businesses. The handbook also describes the PSED data collection process; provides documentation of the interview schedules, codebooks, data preparation and weighting scheme; as well as offers examples of how analyses of PSED data might be conducted. The authors identify specific measures that can be used to operationalize theory as well as provide evidence from the PSED data sets on these measures′ reliability and validity.

The Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics is ideal for a sizeable audience, including graduate students, academics, and librarians in schools of business and management who need a comprehensive reference on business creation. In addition, researchers and policy makers at the federal, state, and local level will find this an invaluable reference covering all of the factors involved in new venture formation.

Key Features:

* Considers categories of data not available prior to the PSED
* Includes a comprehensive overview of theories about new business formation
* Provides demographics of nascent entrepreneurs
* Analyzes the cognitive characteristics of nascent entrepreneurs
* Explores all of the processes of new business formation

William B. Gartner is the Arthur M. Spiro Professor of Entrepreneurship at Clemson University. Prior to joining Clemson he was on the faculty at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, San Francisco State University, and the University of Southern California. He is one of the co-founders of the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium, which initiated, developed and managed the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics. His service to the entrepreneurship field has included two consecutive terms as Chair of the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division (1985 + 1986), special issue editorships for the Journal of Business Venturing (JBV) and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ETP), and Editorial Board memberships with the Academy of Management Review (AMR), Journal of Management (JOM), JBV, ETP, and the Journal of Small Business Management (JSBM). His research has: been published in AMR, JBV, ETP, JOM and JSBM; won awards from the Academy of Management, ETP, and the Babson-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference; and has been funded by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Coleman Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, Small Business Foundation of America, the Los Angeles Times, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the Corporate Design Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His research on nascent entrepreneurs explores how they: find and identify opportunities, recognize and solve startup problems, and undertake actions to successfully launch new ventures. He is also collecting and analyzing the stories entrepreneurs tell about their entrepreneurial adventures.