|
If you encounter problems viewing this email go to http://www.publicforuminstitute.org/nde/news/nde-news.htm |
|
|
|
|
Week of June 20 - June 24, 2005Welcome to the National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship, an initiative of the Public Forum Institute made possible by a grant from the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City. Through NDE-news, we bring you short summaries and analyses of various trends driving the innovation economy. Subscribe now to receive your weekly copy. Archived issues are available online. Links to the day's entrepreneurship stories from across the nation and around the world are posted each weekday on the NDE main page - bookmark it and stay informed about the latest entrepreneurship news. |
|
|
Bankruptcy Law To Inhibit Entrepreneurship? New bankruptcy legislation recently passed by Congress earlier this year was based on inaccurate data and may serve as a deterrent to potential entrepreneurs according to researchers at Harvard Law School and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. While official government statistics report that business bankruptcies have dropped from approximately 18% in the mid-1980s to only 2% today, the new study, funded by the Kauffman Foundation, contends that the data fail to account for somewhere in the neighborhood of 300,000 bankruptcies filed by small business owners. Separate data compiled by Dun & Bradstreet and the Small Business Administration also contradict official government statistics, both showing a significant increase in small business failures in the past twenty years. The study, The Myth of the Disappearing Business Bankruptcy, appears in the most recent issue of the California Law Review. Download a copy of the study at http://www.kauffman.org/pdf/eship_bankruptcy_061505.pdf |
|
|
A new study of California’s biotechnology industry yields some interesting insights about how biotech firms get started, grow, and become industry leaders.
The Dynamics of California’s Biotechnology Industry, by Junfu Zhang and Nikesh Patel, examines how and why California remains the world’s leader in biotech. The recipe for California’s success is pretty straight-forward, but not easy to duplicate: high quality labor, strong research capacity, and abundant venture capital. While the authors expect California to remain a strong, if not dominant, player in biotech, they also caution that the economic benefits of biotechnology may be dwarfed by those generated by information technology industries. Biotechnology development takes time, does not generate massive network effects, and does not often generate new fundamental technologies that stimulate other industries. The report also describes some interesting trends in the biotech field. Scientists tend to start most new businesses, and they tend to locate companies in the regions where they were doing their original research. Universities tend to generate more spin-offs than do existing biotech firms. Finally, most of the growth in the field comes from new start-up activity as opposed to growth in existing companies. |
|
|
Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Microenterprise In an effort to examine the past and future of microenterprise, the Aspen Institute’s FIELD program has recently published a comprehensive guide to microenterprise entitled,
Opening Opportunities, Building Ownership: Fulfilling the Promise of Microenterprise in the United
States. The report reviews the history and current status of the field, and, most importantly, presents a number of recommendations for how to improve microenterprise operations and sustain programs for the long term. Many of these ideas revolve around more effective management processes, and include useful ideas such as expanding the use of technology, improving performance measurement, and differentiating products and services for different markets. The report is an excellent primer on the history of microenterprise in the US, as well as a source for background on innovative and effective practices. |
|
|
Business is not the only sector that is trying to act in a more entrepreneurial and innovative manner. The world of philanthropy is also being transformed by these trends. A new report, The Future of Philanthropy, examines where the field is going and how foundations and individual donors can be more effective and productive. The report suggests a “new ecology of social benefit.” This concept recognizes that organizational boundaries are blurred, networks are more easily formed and developed, and that the pace of change has grown more rapid. All of these trends mean that traditional approaches to philanthropy are growing less viable. The new environment will place a premium on accountability, effectiveness, and a robust infrastructure to support philanthropic investments.
The Future of Philanthropy website includes a report detailing these trends as well as a host of other sources of information and data on the state of philanthropy in the U.S. |
|
|
Promising Practices in Entrepreneurship For 18 years, the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) has published its Development Report Card of the States, an assessment of how states are doing in terms of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship. In a new series of reports, CFED is now seeking to build upon this base. Its Promising Practices series will go beyond a traditional report card, and offer vignettes of best practices from around the US. The first series examines innovative programs that support local entrepreneurship with a particular focus on the topics of networking, finance, training and education, services, and public policy. If you’re interested in discovering the state of the art in entrepreneurial development programs, this is a good place to start. |
|
|
Innovation in the Lehigh Valley At the turn of the last century, Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley was a world-class center of innovation, thanks to local firms like Bethlehem Steel and Lehigh Portland Cement. Now, a new effort is underway to jump start local innovation in the 21st century. Last fall, the Harry C. Trexler Trust and De Sales University sponsored a symposium to examine the climate for innovation in the Greater Lehigh Valley. The results are summarized in a new report entitled
Creating an Economy of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Greater Lehigh
Valley. The report contains numerous recommendations, contending that the region needs to nurture a new entrepreneurial ecosystem that facilitates new business creation and growth. It also recommends that all levels of the education system embrace the teaching of entrepreneurship as a means to stimulate creative thinking and more effectively prepare workers and future entrepreneurs for the new globalized economy. |
|
|
|
National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship
|
|
All
stories © 2005 The Public Forum Institute
Subscribe: Unsubscribe: Privacy
Statement: |
|
