A month or so back I did a post on the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research & Educational Trust Employer Health Benefits Annual Survey which is a survey of employers on benefits issues.  Today, I thought I would highlight the Commonwealth Fund Biennial Health Insurance Survey.  The most recent survey was completed in 2007 and the survey instrument and other summary reports are available online.  A specific report on small business was released last week. 

Right away, one thing which is different about the Commonwealth survey is that it is a household survey, not a business survey.  This has some major advantages when looking at this issue since health care is often a topic which is not well understood without full information on all members of a household.  How is entrepreneurship measured in the survey? 

So, self-employment and size of business are the two main cuts.  No business age is collected or if the people involved in the smaller businesses are actually owners or founder.

And what have the results shown?  They really tend to highlight the potential improvements for many involved in entrepreneurship if some sort of improved health insurance options can be worked out.  Currently, the self-employed and those working for smaller firms are the most likely people to report going without insurance at some point in a given year.


Read more from the source report.

It'd be great to look at an oversample of nascent entrepreneurs with this population to consider if anything new could be learned. 

The International Journal of Technoentrepreneurship has a new call out on "Challenges of Triple Helix Nexus in Managing Science Parks and Innovation Centers to Foster High-Tech Start-Ups."  Deadline August 15, 2010.  Read more.

The journal Entrepreneurship and Regional Development has put out a call targeting "the contribution of entrepreneurship education to regional development".  Deadline is November 1, 2009.  Read more. 

The World Bank's Doing Business has published data for 2010.  This effort "investigating the regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it" continues to be one of the most successful efforts to collect benchmark data and drive policy changes.  Additionally, as a recent Economist article notes, these indicators are now widely used in academic and policy research.  Also perhaps of interest is a more in-depth report from late last year on paying taxes across countries. 

I would highlight an upcoming conference that Kauffman and the World Bank are sponsoring looking entrepreneurship and growth.

This morning I read a new report called "The grey economy: How third age entrepreneurs are contributing to growth" by Ron Botham and Andrew Graves.  This project was funded by National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) in the U.K.  This report is particularly interesting in that it summarizes a survey which was undertaken in the U.K. specifically to look at firms started by older entrepreneurs, as well as topics like innovative activities.  While their survey response rates were not particularly good, other aspects of the design seemed pretty robust on my first reading of their protocol.  I know there is a great deal of interest in the older entrepreneur population, as highlighted by some recent reports by Kauffman and others, and would point interested parties to this report (and the accompanying literature review).  Although this is the first survey which I can remember which stratifies to get an oversample of older entrepreneurs, I doubt it will be the last. 

The Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset covers the diffusion of 104 technologies in 161 countries during the last 200 years.  It is an aggregation of some earlier technology diffusion datasets and has most recent year of coverage as 2003.  The data is available for download.  Interested potential users should review a new overview paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research. 

The authors summarize their definition of technologies as follows:

"They [technologies] are either: (i) the number of  capital goods specifically related to accomplishing particular tasks, (ii) the amounts of particular tasks that have been accomplished, (iii) the number of users of a particular manner to accomplish a task. These three types of measures are best illustrated with three examples. (i) The number of sail ships (measured in tonnage) in use in a country; (ii) Metric tons of steel produced using blast‐oxygen steel furnaces; (iii) the number of households that subscribe to cable tv services."

The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is hosting a one-day workshop in Washington, DC on "Accelerating Energy Innovation: Lessons from Multiple Sectors".  The presentations will be held on October 23, 2009 the National Press Club, 529 14th Street, NW, Washington, DC.

The program can be found at http://www.nber.org/~confer/2009/EIf09/program.html.  If you would like to attend, please email Rob Shannon by October 9, 2009.

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of Business & Society

The task of this Business & Society special issue is to discuss the consequences of a political mandate of the business firm and to examine the implications for the theory of the firm. We specifically invite papers which take a critical perspective on the political role of the firm. Authors should aim to develop strong theoretical and/or empirical insights that increase our understanding of the political behavior of global business firms and their contribution to society. We would like to see the contributions advance the discussion in two main directions that address the philosophical, theoretical, and practical domains of Business & Society:

1. Theoretical concepts of a political theory of the business firm.
Papers here might address questions such as the following:

• Do companies have a political responsibility, and, if so, how can it be defined?
• What does “political behavior” mean in a globalizing world?
• How can we find a balance between corporate power and the public interest?
• How can the link between organizational creativity and social innovation be conceptualized and explored?
• How can the activities of companies be democratically controlled?
• What are the problems caused by corporate political strategies and political lobbying?
• What are the consequences of a political conception of corporate social responsibility for corporate governance and the economic theory of the firm?

2. Implications for management theory building.
Possible topics might include (but are not restricted to) the following:

• What role do organizational creativity and resources play for social innovations?
• What are the consequences of the political role for organizational legitimacy?
• What can be learned from the emerging forms of cooperation between business firms, NGOs, and civil society groups (e.g., with respect to private–public-partnerships)?
• How can responsible leadership contribute to social innovations?
• Which organizational structures or incentive systems support social innovations?
• How do business firms try to deal with their enlarged political role (best practices)?

 

Deadline March 1, 2010

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Technology Innovation Program (TIP) has posted a call for papers to inform future programs.  The Advanced Technology Program of NIST was featured in our 2007 Kauffman Data Symposium for some of the data it had available to researchers.  While this current call is pretty high-level, I wanted to highlight that NIST has a history of being open to collecting high-quality research data which also can be informative to their programs. 

The call highlights the following areas of particular interest to TIP:

• An area of critical national need means an area that justifies government attention because the magnitude of the problem is large and the associated societal challenges that need to be overcome are not being addressed, but could be addressed through high-risk, high-reward research.
• A societal challenge is a problem or issue confronted by society that when not addressed could negatively affect the overall function and quality of life of the Nation, and as such, justifies government action. A societal challenge is associated with barriers preventing the successful development of solutions to the area of critical national need. TIP’s mission is to tackle the technical issues that can be addressed through high-risk, high-reward research. The results of the high-risk, high-reward research should have the potential for transformational results.
• A transformational result is a potential project outcome that enables disruptive changes over and above current methods and strategies. Transformational results have the potential to radically improve our understanding of systems and technologies, challenging the status quo of research approaches and applications.

Papers are being accepted from November 9, 2009 through September 30, 2010.

New Economics Papers (NEP) has added a new distribution service for new papers in small business management.  NEP is a free service of RePEc, a larger effort to disseminate research in economics, This is a nice complement to its existing notification services on entrepreneurship and innovation.  We sponsor a broader dissemination tool with Social Science Research Network (SSRN).  I subscribe to both services and have found that SSRN has better coverage of U.S. research and is inclusive of non-economics disciplines, while NEP has better coverage of Europe economics institutions.  Unfortunately, neither provider has data-specific notifications.