Context is everything in entrepreneurship research. This book compellingly demonstrates the ways in which the distinctive European cultural, societal and geographic environments enable research into new entrepreneurial phenomena. It also gives guidance as to how future research should endeavour to understand the influences of context.

This book aims to provide new approaches to analysing and thinking about how entrepreneurial ecosystems develop and evolve over time as well as shed light on the relatively unexplored area of entrepreneurship ecosystem dynamics. The concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems has emerged as a framework to understand the nature of places in which entrepreneurial activity flourishes. Time is fundamental to the analysis of the dynamics of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. New firm creation, survival, growth and demise all occur within a temporal context that is, over and within time. Systems approaches to research invariably model the influential effects of the actors and elements that shape, re-shape, maintain, shift and change the system itself. An entrepreneurial ecosystem point of view, therefore, is inherently time-dependent and provides an analytical framework that reveals how the number and diversity of entrepreneurial actors situated in a place and time influence the creation of new firms, their survival, growth, and ultimately the stability of markets and industry in a time and place. Whether for better or worse, the historic and present time dimensions underpin the functioning and trajectory of entrepreneurial ecosystem performances and how they are shaped over time. Each chapter in this edited volume outlines a particular perspective and/or a unique case drawn from a range of countries that collectively reveal the dynamics of an ever-changing entrepreneurial ecosystem. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.

"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

New organizations do not emerge full blown from the idiosyncratic minds of individual entrepreneurs. Their ideas for new organizations, their ability to acquire capital and other essential resources, and their likelihood of survival as entrepreneurs derive from the contexts in which they live and work. The Entrepreneurship Dynamic explores the conditions that prompt the founding of large numbers of new organizations or entirely new industries, and the effects on existing industries, economies, and societies.

Navigating Entrepreneurial Contexts highlights the critical importance of understanding and adapting entrepreneurship to the diverse contexts in which businesses operate. The heterogeneity of the topics covered in this book reflects the richness of theories and methods employed in this interdisciplinary field of study.

This innovative book takes seriously the ordinary activities of entrepreneurship and maps out new pathways for scholars to understand the nature, properties, and implications of studying practices for entrepreneurship studies. Entrepreneurship is neither an art nor a science, but a bundle of practices, as Peter Drucker once observed. Curiously however, academic research on entrepreneurship mostly abstracts away from practical activity. In contrast, Entrepreneurship As Practice takes ordinary activities of entrepreneurship seriously by mapping out new pathways for scholars to consider the everyday practices through which entrepreneurship occurs. Each chapter draws on contemporary theories of practice to illuminate the nature, properties, and implications of studying the practices of entrepreneurship. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.

This book provides readers with the latest research on the dynamics of language and language diversity in professional contexts. Bringing together novel findings from a range of disciplines, it challenges practitioners and management scholars to question the conventional understanding of language as words with stable meanings, an assumption which treats language as a tool that can be managed by language policies that ‘standardize’ language. Each of the contributions is designed to recognize the strides that have been made in the past two decades in research on language and languages in organizational settings while addressing remaining blind spots and emerging issues. Particular attention is given to multilingualism, sociolinguistic approaches to language in the workplace, migration challenges, critical perspectives on the power of language use and the management of organizations as dialogical, discursive spaces.

This book identifies Friederike Welter’s key contribution to entrepreneurship research over recent decades, and shows how her work is contextualised in time and place. The book gives a differentiated understanding of entrepreneurship and contexts, celebrating diversity as well as complexity.

This study reflects leadership development is a multilevel multi-context self-learning longitudinal journey embedded in a social learning environment with nine influential factors: parents, teamwork sport activities, teachers, role models, mentors/coaches, community-based networks (social factors); self-learning, experimentation, self-reflection (self factors). These findings of the book are based on a longitudinal qualitative study of interviewing 100 SME's business owners and leaders attending a British leadership development framework and an international communication and leadership programme.