The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has issued a call for papers for the next meeting of the Entrepreneurship Working Group, which will held on Friday, December 11, 2009 in Cambridge, MA.

If you are interested in presenting a paper at the meeting, please upload a copy here http://www.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=ENTf09 by October 12, 2009.  Please contact Rob Shannon in the NBER's Conference Department if you have any further questions.  He can be reached at 617/868-3900 or
rshannon@nber.org.

The Business Ethics Quarterly has issued a call for papers on "Reviving Tradition: Virtue and the Common Good in Business and Management."  Included in the call is an appeal related to "How does the virtue of honesty play a role in financial reporting, or prudence in investing, or courage in entrepreneurship, or moderation in marketing?"  Due date: July 15, 2010. 

Today President Obama delivered a somewhat high-profile speech on innovation in New York.  This coincided with his National Economic Council's release of a new white paper on innovation.  Both highlight the key role that they believe entrepreneurship and innovation can play in leading future economic growth.  Of particular interest to the audience on this blog is the following paragraph:

• Stimulate entrepreneurship through increased access to government data. The Administration launched Data.gov, a one-stop shop for free access to data generated across all Federal agencies. By empowering the American people to find, use, and repackage data, Data.gov will give rise to new businesses (like the GPS and genomics industries that grew from increased access to public information) and empower entrepreneurs to evaluate opportunities.

I find this a really interesting perspective but am skeptical that most readers of the paper will agree on first pass.  Entrepreneurship through data access?  Entrepreneurship through data access!  Yes!  Government data can open up new industries, but government data is vital to all commerce - new firms, existing firms, domestic or international.  From the decennial census to other surveys on commerce and technology, more often than not, it is government data which drives the models which feed into private business forecast.  Yes, government data is often not detailed enough or timely enough for many private sector needs so data is imputed, assumptions are made, or other trade offs get considered.  And while there are an increasing array of private sector data vendors on different topics, many of these sources could not exist without their government statistical couterparts.  This issue is at the heart of my own passion for the subject of data and data availability.  I hope the White House focus on it brings more light to the topic. 

The Kauffman Firm Survey data collection continues to progress well.  Currently in its fifth collection period, we have received initial tabulations from Mathematica, the survey research firm executing the collection, that show continued responsiveness from our panel but also that the new or modified questions we added in the fourth survey (covering 2008 activities) are working well and getting interesting information.  It was an oversight on my part that I never posted the questions changes we made previously.  We expect to close data collection by the end of the year and to post the data for researchers a couple of months into 2010.

With that said, even though we are still finishing collection on the 2008 data, we are kicking off plans for the survey covering 2009 activities.  We have posted a call for suggestions on the questionnaire.  We have done this for three years and have gotten some interesting responses, some of which have been added.  While we would love nothing more to collect all the questions which researchers want to collect, we have a really high standard for accepting changes to the questionnaire.  We judge the questions based on relevancy to the rest of the data in the survey, the validity of collecting data on the time period we are currently surveying on (2009) vs. earlier activities, expected incidence within the KFS population, and other factors such as if the questions have ever been tested on other surveys or would help to demonstrate concepts which could be picked up by other ongoing surveys if successful. 

In addition, we are seeking a part-time research assistant on the KFS. 

Nature has a disheartening article out published this last week on the success of different projects attempting to encourage data sharing among academics.  Unfortunately, my experience has been entirely too in-line with what the authors found that data sharing is an entirely discipline-specific beast.  Within Management, probably the discipline of study most associated with entrepreneurship scholarship (with Economics a close second), data sharing is not common.  In fact, the discipline encourages, for the most part, studies which are based on proprietary data and that can never be replicated or accessed.  It is so incredibly frustrating.  In Economics, I would assess things as slightly better but not by much.  

I have had numerous conversations with people over the years who are interested in changing these discipline specific norms.  Unfortunately, these conversations often don't go very far.  Personally, I think the only hope of creating holistic change needs to start at the discipline level and would need to come from the top down vs. the bottom up.  If a coalition of the top journals in a given discipline were to come together and adopt new rules on data disclosure and sharing that were standard and implemented uniformly, every could change.  As it stands, I have never seen something like that happen.  Within Economics, many of the top journals in theory require data accessibility for publication but the actual implementation of these rules is spotty and hasn't spread to all publications.

With such a downtrodden take on the subject I should highlight a couple of cases that are the exceptions to the rule:

• We have a major innovation survey hitting the field at some point in the spring through Duke and Georgia Tech.  The principals on that project, with a little prodding, have created a user research consortium including some emerging scholars, who will use NORC's Data Enclave tool to allow for a geographically diverse community of scholars to leverage the data collected.  
• Rob Wiltbank and Rob Fairlie have both been very generous in making data they created for different Kauffman projects available.  The Angel Investor Performance Project and the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity both allow for micro-data-based research.

I am not including here a discussion of public-use data sets only because such data sets have an added layer of complexity although many of the issues identified here and in the Nature article are also applicable to on public-use data files. 

Are you passionate on this topic or have an idea?  Let me know. 

The third international FINPIN conference has issued a call for papers. April 25-27, 2010, in Joensuu, Finland, this meeting and discussion forum for practicioners and researchers who want to exchange their know-how and best practices. Explore "Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Universities."  Deadline: September 30, 2009

I have neglected to mention a couple of popular data releases from the Census Bureau in the last few months.  Unfortunately, these are not 2008 or 2009 data, which is the time period everyone really wants currently. 

• County Businss Patterns, 2007 (to the zip code level)

• Business Expenses, 2007 (Retail, Wholesale, and Services)

• Nonemployers, 2007

An article in today's Wall Street Journal highlights findings from the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index that business owners come out on top of all other occupations in terms of happiness.



The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index is constructed using a thousand person daily sample in the United States.  It measures six areas:

• Life Evaluation
• Emotional Health
• Physical Health
• Healthy Behavior
• Work Environment
• Basic Access

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.