MU ExCEED in the News

The University of Missouri’s Extension Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development program (ExCEED) works with local communities to foster economic development by promoting entrepreneurial initiatives. McQuinn Center Faculty Research Fellow Mary Leuci, MU Assistant Dean for Community Development Extension, provides administrative and programmatic leadership for ExCEED.

ExCEED was recently nominated for the 2011 C. Peter Magrath University/Community Engagement Award, sponsored by the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU), which recognizes “programs that demonstrate how colleges and universities have redesigned their learning, discovery, and engagement functions to become even more involved with their communities.” The nomination highlighted MU’s work in the Mississippi River Hills Region and Ozark Heritage Region to promote entrepreneurship and regional economic development.

MU Extension was also one of eight groups selected by USDA-Rural Development to pilot the new regional economic development curriculum Stronger Economies Together (SET). SET “is designed to help regional groups in rural areas to identify their economic strengths and opportunities and to formulate a plan to capitalize on those assets.” Two regional groups, Old Trails Regional Partnership and Lake Ozark Regional Economic Development Council, were the two participants in Missouri. Sharon Gulick, MU Extension’s  Community Economic and Entrepreneurial Development program (ExCEED) Director, is providing leadership and serves on the national development team for SET.

Entrepreneurship Advice from Conan O’Brien

Thanks to streaming video, we entrepreneurship instructors are rapidly becoming obsolete. I mean, why listen to us when you can get what you need from Conan?

Spatial Collocation and Venture Capital in Biotechnology

University of Missouri economists and McQuinn Center friends Christos Kolympiris, Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes, and Douglas Miller have a new paper on the collocation of biotechnology firms and venture capital funds. The paper’s just been accepted at Research Policy. Check it out:

Spatial Collocation and Venture Capital in the US Biotechnology Industry
Christos Kolympiris
Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes
Douglas Miller
University of Missouri

Biotechnology firms operate in a high-risk and high-reward environment and are in a constant race to secure venture capital (VC) funds. Previous contributions to the literature show that the VC firms tend to invest locally in order to monitor their investments and to provide operating assistance to their target firms. Further, biotechnology is a knowledge-based industry that tends to exhibit spatial clusters, and the firms in such industries may collocate to benefit from gaining access to local markets for specialized inputs (e.g., skilled researchers) and from local knowledge spillovers and network externalities. If such gains exist, we expect that the collocated firms should exhibit positively correlated performance, including in their ability to attract venture capital funds. The purpose of this paper is to empirically measure the strength and spatial extent of the relationships among the amount of funds raised by proximate biotechnology firms. We model these relationships with a spatial autoregression (SAR) model, and we control for characteristics of the biotechnology firms and the VC firms that provide their funds as well as site-specific factors. Based on our fitted SAR model, we find that the amount of venture capital raised by a particular biotechnology firm is significantly influenced by the number of VC firms and the VC funding levels raised by biotechnology firms located within a 10 mile radius, but these relationships are not statistically significant beyond this range.

Call for Papers: Entrepreneurial Action

“‘[W]hile many factors and constructs are important to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship itself does not happen until someone takes action!” Have the organizers been reading Foss and Klein (1, 2)?

CALL FOR PAPERS
Entrepreneurial Action

 Volume 14 of Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth
Due date: August 1, 2011

Editors:
Andrew C. Corbett, RPI; Jerome Katz, Saint Louis University

Advances in Entrepreneurship, Firm Emergence and Growth provides an annual examination of the major current research, theoretical, and methodological efforts in the field of entrepreneurship, and its related disciplines, including firm emergence and growth research. The Advances series also publishes papers from other fields, such as strategy, organizational behavior, or sociology that use entrepreneurial samples or make a contribution to entrepreneurial theory or research.

Volume 14 will consider the central issue of entrepreneurial action: while many factors and constructs are important to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship itself does not happen until someone takes action! Both theoretical and empirical manuscripts that consider all aspects of entrepreneurial action are encouraged. A representative, but by no means exhaustive, listing of relevant topics includes:

• The antecedents to entrepreneurial action
• Psychological factors and entrepreneurial action
• Sociological factors and entrepreneurial action
• Economic factors and entrepreneurial action
• Relationships between opportunity recognition, evaluation and entrepreneurial action
• Relationships between failure and entrepreneurial action
• Networks, networking and entrepreneurial action
• Cross-cultural comparative studies of entrepreneurial action
• Theoretical and conceptual models of entrepreneurial action
• Moderators and mediators of entrepreneurial action
• Entrepreneurship education employing entrepreneurial action
• Entrepreneurial action in different context – corporate, social, family business, etc.

The papers in Advances reflect many state-of-the-art topics and approaches, and are written by leading researches in the field, making each volume an important source of information for virtually all entrepreneurship researchers. The distinctive competence of research volumes such as Advances is that the chapters can be published without page restrictions allowing for greater detail in the background, development, and implementation of ideas than is possible in journal articles. This provides authors with the opportunity to fully express their key ideas, provide much more complete support, and include relevant multi-page appendices. In effect, the Advances series provides authors the opportunity to publish an “article of record” of their major theoretical or empirical ideas, and see it disseminated to a wide audience. Today, the series is in the libraries of virtually all of the schools with active Ph.D. programs in entrepreneurship, as well as the majority of AACSB accredited schools with MBA concentrations in entrepreneurship and related fields.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss paper ideas with interested researchers. Submissions to Volume 14 of Advances will be blind reviewed by peers. Contact information for the editors: Andrew Corbett, 518/879-9117, acorbett@babson.edu; and Jerry Katz, 314/977-3864, katzja@slu.edu.

Award-Winner McQuinners

J.C. Won

Per Bylund

Mario Mondelli

It’s been a good academic year for McQuinn-affiliated scholars. Graduate Research Fellow Jong-Chul Won was one of three winners of the 2010 Don Lavoie Memorial Graduate Student Essay Competition sponsored by the SDAE. Graduate Research Fellow Per Bylund was named a Dan Searle Fellow by the Institute of Humane Studies for 2010-2011 and also won competitive travel grants from the IHS’s Hayek Fund for Scholars and the History of Economics Society’s Warren J. and Sylvia J. Samuels Young Scholars Program. Per also received the Albert R. Hagan Memorial Graduate Fellowship in Agricultural Economics, awarded annually to the top graduate student in Missouri’s Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics. And Graduate Research Fellow Mario Mondelli received the Department’s Frank Miller Scholarship for outstanding achievement.

Congratulations to J.C., Per, and Mario for their great work this year. Expect them to have a significant impact on entrepreneurship scholarship in the years to come.

I picked up a couple of 2010 Best Paper Awards, one from the Association of Private Enterprise Education (for this paper) and one from the European Management Review (for this). And I’m going to call Dan Elfenbein an honorary McQuinner as well.

For award-winning entrepreneurship research, McQuinn is the place to be!

Inter-Generational Entrepreneurship?

As any entrepreneur (or entrepreneurship scholar) knows, the future is uncertain. This is why entrepreneurs, aiming to achieve ends in the unknown future, can make profits only under the “threat” of making losses. While this profit-and-loss system provides a framework for the self-regulating market process, one should not forget Ben Franklin’s statement that ”in the world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.”

Both of these “certain” phenomena are studied by two Uppsala University scholars, Marcus Eliason and Henry Ohlsson, who apply a data-driven approach to what may be called “inter-generational entrepreneurship.” Eliason and Ohlsson study the effects of repealing of the inheritance tax in Sweden and how that affected people’s timing of their own deaths. As astonishing as it is morbid, the researchers find a significant difference in the frequency of deaths before and after the repeal (controlling for other possible causes): married men and women were found to be 12% more likely to die on 1 January 2004 (after the repeal) than on 31 December 2003.

While more research is surely needed to identify the true causal relationships in this matter, for now it seems people on their death beds made sure to stick around a little longer — for financial reasons and for the sake of their loved ones. Judging from the results of this research, it seems that the country of Sweden, known for the world’s highest tax rates, shows the truthfulness of the statement that “love conquers all” — even post-death taxation. Maybe death and taxes are not as certain as Franklin would have us believe.

AoM Entrepreneurship Doctoral Consortium

PhD students in economics, management, sociology, political science, and related fields interested in entrepreneurship should consider attending the Academy of Management’s Doctoral Consortium, 12-13 August 2011 in San Antonio. I am  conducting the theory workshop along with my friend Elaine Mosakowski. Other faculty facilitators include Susan Madsen, Steve Barr, Jim Combs, Gerry George, Marc Gruber, Phil Kim, Dan Forbes, Sanjay Jain, Susanna Khavul, Lou Marino, Geoff Kistruck, Jill Kickul, Jeff Covin, Jack Pearce, Jonathan Linton, and Bob Strom. See below for instructions, courtesy of Steve Michael and Joe Coombs, ENT Division Doctoral Consortium Chairs:

We invite applications for the 2011 Entrepreneurship Doctoral Consortium!

The Entrepreneurship Division will sponsor its annual consortium for doctoral students during the 2011 annual meetings of the Academy of Management in San Antonio, Texas. The Consortium brings together doctoral students and experienced faculty to discuss opportunities and challenges as scholars in the field. This year, the program will include panels and discussions on dissertation strategies, first job and career path considerations, establishing research partnerships, and a host of other topics. Students will also receive detailed and constructive feedback on their work from an accomplished scholar in the field. The Consortium will begin at 9 am on Friday, August 12, continue until 5 pm on Saturday, August 13, and include a dinner Friday evening.

The Consortium is open to doctoral students who have completed approximately two to three years of their Ph.D. program. The ideal candidate will have finished coursework and be engaged in preparing a dissertation proposal.

To apply, please follow the two steps below.

New Ventures / New Entrepreneurs

An organic product CSA

A chestnut mill

A rural artist retreat

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Today, a class of new entrepreneurs from The Entrepreneurship Project in Agriculture began making oral presentations — pitches — of new venture plans that they have put together over the course of the 4-month learning program. One of the measures of impact (performance) of the USDA grant that supports the Project is the number of new farm ventures that are in operation within 3 years of the training. I predict that more than half of the class will be engaged in their ventures by the end of the year. I’ll follow up on this prediction. Stay tuned.

The Nature of Opportunity

Randy asks a question that indirectly strikes at the core of what is the nature of opportunities. Much of the literature assumes, in a common interpretation (application?) of Kirzner’s (1973) “pure entrepreneur,” that opportunities are objective and that they are there for the grasping for the alert entrepreneur. But as the previous two posts (1, 2) suggest, what is important in the market is the action rather than the discovery of an opportunity. After all, most entrepreneurial ventures do fail.

Ideas Mean Nothing — 1692 version

The world’s first economics and business journalist, Daniel Dafoe, wrote his first book in 1692 (or so) and published it in 1697. It is titled An Essay Upon Projects. It is an account of the times which he calls The Projecting Age, in which stock companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Mississippi Company were the largest of the speculative ventures that Dafoe saw around him. He decried many of these as blatant attempts by unscrupulous idea mongers who were seeking fast payoffs from gullible investors.

There are, and that too many, fair pretences of fine discoveries, new inventions, engines, and I know not what, which — being advanced in notion, and talked up to great things to be performed when such and such sums of money shall be advanced, and such and such engines are made — have raised the fancies of credulous people to such a height that, merely on the shadow of expectation, they have formed companies, chose committees, appointed officers, shares, and books, raised great stocks, and cried up an empty notion to that degree that people have been betrayed to part with their money for shares in a new nothing. . . .

For Dafoe, the vast number of projectors who never made the requisite investments to bring a product to market dwarfs the number of honest projectors who finish the job. The former are contemptible, the latter are the engine of the economy.

Why, then, do we fixate on the “opportunity” — the project — in entrepreneurship research, when the entrepreneurial action of creating real value is what matters?