Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics

"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 ha...