Habitual Entrepreneurs examines the scale of habitual entrepreneurship and uses insights from human capital theory and cognitive theories to present a theoretical case for distinguishing between different types of entrepreneurs with reference to their prior business ownership experience.

Increasingly, entrepreneurship research recognizes a wide variety in entrepreneurial behaviour. One such difference is marked between experienced or habitual entrepreneurs and novices. This book, authored by established experts in the field, introduces and explores the habitual entrepreneur phenomenon. Building upon an international body of research, the authors analyse business behaviour to demonstrate how experience relates to the performance of new ventures. In employing a range of methodological techniques, the authors provide insight into how prior business ownership experience produces different outcomes when it comes to the key success factors associated with entrepreneurial ventures. With detailed coverage of finance, networking, opportunity discovery, and learning, the book is a uniquely comprehensive resource. This concise book is a complete research guide which provides an introduction for advanced students and researchers of entrepreneurship worldwide.

What is entrepreneurship? Is it important? What do entrepreneurs actually do? These are a few of the key questions considered in this Very Short Introduction. Paul Westhead and Mike Wright provide a clear guide to all aspects of the process of entrepreneurship, including the diversity of the people involved and the benefits it brings to society.

A Blueprint for Building Entrepreneurial Organizations Nobody needs to tell you that in the new economy, managers using conventional strategies are losing out to smart, fast, entrepreneurial competitors who move on ideas others overlook and who confidently act while others dither. Are the managers of leading companies simply doomed to let this happen? Not at all, argue Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan. The fundamental problem is that the tools, training, and conceptual frameworks that work for business-as-usual can't, and don't, work when your main challenge is to bury old business models and aggressively create completely new ones. To succeed, today's strategists need the thought process and discipline that are second nature to successful entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset offers a refreshingly practical blueprint for thinking and acting in environments that are fast-paced, rapidly changing, and highly uncertain. It provides both a guide to energizing the organization to find tomorrow's opportunities and a set of entrepreneurial principles you can use personally to transform the arenas in which you compete. Using lessons drawn from leading entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial companies, The Entrepreneurial Mindset presents a set of practices for capitalizing on uncertainty and rapid change. Like McGrath and MacMillan's bestselling Harvard Business Review articles, such as "Discovery-Driven Planning," the book provides simple but powerful ways to stop acting by the old rules and start thinking with the discipline of habitual entrepreneurs. The Entrepreneurial Mindset will show you how to: * Eliminate paralyzing uncertainty by creating an entrepreneurial frame that shapes a shared understanding of what is to be accomplished and what would be worthwhile * Create a richly stocked opportunity register in which you mobilize great ideas for redesigning existing products, finding new sources of differentiation, resegmenting existing markets, reconfiguring market spaces, and seizing the huge upside potential of breakthroughs * Build a dynamic portfolio of businesses and options that continuously move your organization toward the future * Execute dynamically your ideas so that you can move fast, with confidence and without undue risk * Develop your own way of leading with an entrepreneurial mindset to create a vibrant entrepreneurial climate within your organization The Entrepreneurial Mindset is about succeeding in an unpredictable world. It will help everyone from independent entrepreneurs to managers of large corporations develop insights that others overlook and act on them to build the truly entrepreneurial organizations of the future.

In some cases, technology-based projects have revolutionized the way of living by contributing to job and wealth creation. These types of ventures, regardless of their outstanding relevance, are the exception rather than the norm in that they account for only a very small percentage of entrepreneurial activity. Although not ignoring these important ventures, the main goal of this title is to fully unleash the wide potential of the entrepreneurial activity, exploring and highlighting the somewhat hidden part, which is ultimately responsible for the largest part of new businesses and, as a consequence, for the wellbeing of millions of people virtually everywhere. The Handbook of Research on Approaches to Alternative Entrepreneurship Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of entrepreneurial activity beyond the traditional boundaries of entrepreneurship research. While highlighting topics including collective business, organizational performance, and generational differences, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, developers, researchers, business managers, industry professionals, academicians, and students seeking to draw attention to distinctive and multifaceted types of entrepreneurship.

This is an excellent book. The conceptual framework and empirical results are presented in a most readable form. The reader is also provided with a comprehensive discussion of the results obtained. The book contains a wealth of information about entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship, and provides numerous suggestions for future research. Economic Outlook and Business Review Despite a number of success stories presented in the media, not all habitual entrepreneurs (entrepreneurs who have owned at least two businesses) are consistently successful. This book is inspired by the apparent dearth of rigorous research to underpin or in some cases challenge the popular perception of habitual entrepreneurs. It seeks to address the gap in the literature by shedding light on the phenomenon of habitual entrepreneurship. Deniz Ucbasaran, Paul Westhead and Mike Wright use a combination of theory and empirical evidence to illustrate why it is so important for researchers, policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors to distinguish between novice (i.e. first time) entrepreneurs and habitual entrepreneurs. Issues tackled include human capital characteristics, information search and opportunity identification behaviours, and the performance of different types of entrepreneurs. The book also highlights the heterogeneity of habitual entrepreneurs by drawing attention to serial and portfolio entrepreneurs. Developing a conceptual framework and an agenda for future research, Habitual Entrepreneurs will prove a significant reference tool for academics, students and researchers with an interest in entrepreneurship and SMEs. Its systematic analysis of the role of prior entrepreneurial experience in the venturing process will also be invaluable to practitioners such as policymakers, entrepreneurs and investors.

Entrepreneurship is a key factor in economic growth, innovation, & the development of firms & businesses. Written by leading scholars, this book presents a comprehensive review of the research in entrepreneurship.

This volume offers insight and perspective on entrepreneurship from the foremost academic leaders in the field.

Family business is the most prominent form of business organization, and its importance to the global economy cannot be under-estimated. Until recently, the impact of the family on entrepreneurial firms has been under-researched, leading to a conceptual gap between the two areas of study, and an underestimation of the contribution of family systems to entrepreneurial success. Starting from the consideration that family is an intimate and essential aspect of entrepreneurship, this book considers connections between family, family members, entrepreneurial behavior, family business, society and the economy. Bringing together a unique range of international contributions, it offers new theoretical perspectives and empirical insights as well as an in-depth consideration of the diversity of contexts and processes associated with entrepreneurship in family settings. Above all, this book opens up a comprehensive research agenda on the linkages between family, family firms and entrepreneurship and will be of interest to researchers, educators and advanced students of entrepreneurship, small firms and family business.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2007 in the subject Business economics - General, grade: 1.3, European Business School - International University Schlo Reichartshausen Oestrich-Winkel, language: English, abstract: Despite its apparent economic importance and increasing scientific devotion, the field of entrepreneurship within the area of business sciences is quite young. However, in the last decades research in the respective areas has grown rapidly, meanwhile providing a considerable and presentable coverage of different topics and areas, having brought forward several theories and concepts. Nevertheless, there are still many blank fields left which urge for exploration. For example, politicians cannot foster entrepreneurship in the most efficient way, as there is no general agreement which group of entrepreneurs or type of ventures are the most welfare gaining ones. Also, neither is it clear yet which entrepreneurial abilities are the most important ones, nor how they can be acquired or conveyed. Generally, acknowledged scholars as Shane/Venkataraman (2000) postulate to focus the research on the actual core of entrepreneurship, the entrepreneur himself. In accordance with this point, several authors further have agreed on focusing on multiple founders, so-called habitual entrepreneurs, supposably providing the best insights and the most valuable information about the field of entrepreneurship. As one of the precursors to this idea, MacMillan expressed that researching anything else than habitual entrepreneurs actually leads to misleading results and besides, in any other research area, it is always the professionals and/or power users acting as the research objects. More recently, Sarasvathy introduced a further extension of the concept: entrepreneurial re-search should shift its focus from the singular relation between one firm and the entrepreneur to a multilateral one. Thus, the firms are to be considered instruments of the entrepreneur who is the actual research