Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics: The Process of Business Creation

The chapters in The Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics 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.

William B. Gartner is the Arthur M. Spiro Professor of Entrepreneurship at Clemson University. Prior to joining Clemson he was on the faculty at Georgetown University, the University of Virginia, San Francisco State University, and the University of Southern California. He is one of the co-founders of the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium, which initiated, developed and managed the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics. His service to the entrepreneurship field has included two consecutive terms as Chair of the Academy of Management Entrepreneurship Division (1985 + 1986), special issue editorships for the Journal of Business Venturing (JBV) and Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice (ETP), and Editorial Board memberships with the Academy of Management Review (AMR), Journal of Management (JOM), JBV, ETP, and the Journal of Small Business Management (JSBM). His research has: been published in AMR, JBV, ETP, JOM and JSBM; won awards from the Academy of Management, ETP, and the Babson-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference; and has been funded by the Kauffman Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, Coleman Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, Small Business Foundation of America, the Los Angeles Times, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company, the Corporate Design Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His research on nascent entrepreneurs explores how they: find and identify opportunities, recognize and solve startup problems, and undertake actions to successfully launch new ventures. He is also collecting and analyzing the stories entrepreneurs tell about their entrepreneurial adventures.

Kelly G. Shaver is Professor of Psychology at the College of William & Mary. From 1977-1979, he was Program Director for Social and Developmental Psychology in the Division of Behavioral and Neural Sciences at the National Science Foundation. He currently serves as an advisor to FamilyCareAmerica.com, is a founding director of MBATechConnect.org, and serves as a member of the international advisory board of the Entrepreneurship and Small Business Research Institute (ESBRI) in Stockholm where he was a Visiting Professor during 1999-2000. For 5 years Dr. Shaver was Editor of Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice and has served on the editorial boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Personality. He currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development, the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship. He is the author of seven books, coauthor or coeditor of five others, and is author or coauthor of over 140 papers and research articles on attribution processes and entrepreneurship. His paper on the motivations of nascent entrepreneurs was the winner of the Babson Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference Best Paper Award for 2000, and his course on the psychology of entrepreneurship won the 2000 McGraw-Hill/Irwin Award for Innovation in Entrepreneurship Pedagogy. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, a member of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, and the current (2003-2004) Chair of the Entrepreneurship Division of the Academy of Management. Shaver's e-mail is kgshav@netscape.net; his web pages are at www.wm.edu/PSYC/shaver.html

Nancy M. Carter holds the Richard M. Schulze Chair in Entrepreneurship at the University of St. Thomas (Minneapolis). Previously she held the Coleman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies, Director of the Center for the Study of Entrepreneurship, and was founding Director of the Center for Family Business at Marquette University. Her research program focuses on the emergence of organizations with a special emphasis on women owned initiatives. She has published extensively on organizations, strategy and entrepreneurship. She is on the editorial review boards of Journal of Small Business Management, Journal of Development Entrepreneurship, and was co-editor of the 17th and 18th Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Research. She co-founded the Entrepreneurship Research Consortium, a cross-national initiative involving 10 countries studying business start-ups.

Paul D. Reynolds is the Paul T. Babson Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College (Wellesley, Massachusetts), a Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship at the London Business School, and the director of the annual Babson-Kauffman Entrepreneurship Research Conference (1996-1999). He was the Coleman Foundation Chair in Entrepreneurial Studies at Marquette University (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) for five years (1990-1995). Reynolds is now coordinator of the Entrepreneurial Research Consortium (ERC), an international collaboration of 31 university units, government agencies and foundations implementing national longitudinal studies of business start-ups in the U.S. and eight other countries. As coordinating principal investigator of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) project, he is coordinating 10 national teams in the first analysis of the contributions of the entrepreneurial sector to national economic growth. He is the author or co-author of three conference proceedings, four books, four data sets in the University of Michigan ICPSR public archives, 25 project reports and research monographs, 60 peer review journal articles or conference proceeding reports, and several hundred professional conference presentations.