Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship

Regions and states utilize venture capital forums to raise the profiles of youthful, potentially high-growth firms located within their boundaries. They aim to help organizations raise capital, to widen professional networks and to stimulate regional development. As a contribution toward determining the success of the forum concept, the Florida venture forum was studied. This paper follows those companies who received funding subsequent to participating in the forum during the period 1997–2003; data is drawn from the forum and public records. Funding profiles are built up for successful participants and the funding entities. A secondary profile, post-funding, is developed that examines the role the funding agent plays in determining whether the funded company remains or migrates from its original location. The finding of this paper is that a significant number of funded entities are located within venture capital cores or clusters. The paper shows that funded companies are younger than non-funded companies, more likely to be acquired and move from their original location. The paper also shows that the participant companies that were acquired achieve an exit strategy by migrating out of the state of Florida.

Public authorities throughout the world, recognizing both the importance and fragility of SMEs, have over the years created agencies and set up numerous venture development support and assistance measures. Despite all these efforts, SME owner-managers do not appear to make maximum use of the services available. Results from a survey of 70 SME owner-managers show that the likelihood of an SME using public support services increases as the perceived usefulness of public agencies and their services increases, and as the level of knowledge of public agencies increases. Furthermore, the probability of using public support services decreases as the experience of the owner-manager increases. On one hand, many owner-managers do not seem to understand the utility or relevance of the services the agencies provide, while on the other, they do not seem to know enough about the agencies working in their region. However, most of the owner-managers who had used the agencies felt the services they had received were appropriate to their needs. Therefore, the problem appears to lie more with the perceptions of certain owner-managers than with the nature or quality of the services themselves.

Small business and entrepreneurship have been at the heart of Pakistan's economy for almost 60 years, yet little (if any) research has been conducted that identifies factors crucial for small business success in Pakistan. In the past, studies identifying factors crucial for small business success have focused primarily on the United States and Western Europe. This paper presents survey results from 265 small business owners located in and around Karachi, the largest city and hub of economic activity in Pakistan. The survey was designed to identify the internal and external factors that Pakistani small businesspersons believe are critical for success.

This qualitative study focuses on the relationship between culture and entrepreneurship in the Torres Strait Islands. Similar to other countries with a low per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), aggregate evidence suggests that entrepreneurial activity is commonplace among the indigenous community. Closer investigation revealed this is particularly so for a form known as "marginal" entrepreneurship. Using Hofstede's (1994) model of cultural dimensions linked to key western entrepreneurial traits, a sample of 61 Torres Strait entrepreneurs showed sizable perceptual trait differences compared with western theory. This has implications on the received current wisdom regarding typical values and characteristics of entrepreneurs. It would appear that cultural differences exist between the entrepreneurs of the Torres Straits and others. The implications of this finding have a potentially significant impact on policy and the level and types of investment funds made available for enabling entrepreneurship in the Torres Straits.

Self-employment promotion for poverty reduction has been administered through microcredit programs in Bangladesh. While microcredit has opened up new opportunities for the poor to start enterprises, some of them have not benefited from microcredit schemes. To enable the poor left behind to participate in the rural economy as entrepreneurs, this paper proposes the creation of a partnership enterprise between a sponsor and poor producers. In this partnership, the sponsor as a master trader supports partner-producers financially, technically and managerially through a subcontracting arrangement. The paper develops this conceptual relationship in a real rural setting through the observation of an income-generating program implemented by a Bangladeshi NGO in the field of poultry-rearing. This empirical form of partnership enterprise suggests an opportunity for the poor to enter into a previously inaccessible market and gain a regular income source, which builds the foundation of their household economy beyond subsistence.

Mirroring the representation of informal workers in a third world context as displaying entrepreneurial qualities, recent years have witnessed the emergence of a similar view of the informal sector in western nations as a hidden enterprise culture. Until now, however, few attempts have been made to analyze the nature and motives of informal entrepreneurs in western economies. Instead, it has been widely assumed that those engaged in entrepreneurship in the informal sector are those marginalized from the formal economy and driven out of necessity into this endeavor as a last resort. The aim of this paper is to evaluate critically this "marginalization thesis". Reporting the findings of face-to-face structured interviews with 130 informal entrepreneurs in England, the conventional representation of these entrepreneurs as necessity-driven, as well as an emergent depiction of them as opportunity-driven, is transcended. Instead, a richer and more textured understanding of informal entrepreneurship is developed that replaces such either/or thinking by a both/and approach that depicts how the majority are concurrently both necessity- and opportunity-driven. The paper then concludes by exploring the public policy implications of this rereading of the nature of informal entrepreneurship in western economies.