On the Back Cover
The Life Cycle of Entrepreneurial Ventures discusses topical issues in entrepreneurship organized around the various stages of venture creation, development and performance. The book is arranged in several parts, dealing with the pre-start stage, followed by venture creation, financing ventures, venture development, and venture performance. Each part contains several chapters written by experts in the relevant field. Like its predecessors, there are contributions from several disciplines, including economics, strategy, business, industrial organization, economic geography, finance and sociology. The multi-disciplinary flavor of the book is complemented by its international evidence base, featuring results from a range of different countries. The volume will be essential reading for everyone interested in entrepreneurship because:
- It contains digestible overviews of several topical issues in entrepreneurship, including nascent entrepreneurship; social (not-for-profit) entrepreneurship; formal, informal and developmental start-up capital; job creation; venture performance; and harvesting. This will help researchers and practitioners who want to cut through the information overload and distil the key points emerging from the latest academic thinking
- It provides new results at the cutting edge of entrepreneurship research
- It portrays entrepreneurship as a coherent entity by spanning the various stages of enterprise evolution
About the Book
about nascent entrepreneurship distilled from recent research. Wagner ?rst summarises evidence about the incidence of nascent entrepreneurship before surveying the start-up activities of nascent entrepreneurs. He then goes on to provide a birds-eye view of the characteristics of nascent entrepreneurs; the factors associated with becoming a nascent entrepreneur; and the outcomes of nascent entrepreneurs, in terms of whether they start, quit or continue preparing for eventual business entry. Wagner s chapter provides a wealth of information about nascent entrepreneurship, summarising key ?ndings from a large, fa- growing and diverse literature which looks set to continue growing rapidly in the years ahead. In Chapter 3, Shaker Zahra reviews the literature on new venture strategy and its implications for organizational survival, ?nancial performance and growth. Zahra discusses competitive, cooperative and political strategies, and highlights the importance of synchronizing these strategies. A particular strength of this chapter is its ability to uncover similarities and unifying themes in apparently divergent views. In this way, the chapter succeeds in resolvingsomeapparentcontradictions byputtingthedifferentperspectivesinto a complementary context and identifying areas where convergence appears to be within reach. Zahra goes on to highlight the contributions of the different strategic approaches, as well as their shortcomings. He concludes by identifying several implications for future research."
