The Office of Advocacy at the U.S. Small Business Administration puts out a nice publication which tries to answer some of their most frequently asked questions.  This document was just updated so you can find interesting things such as:

• small businesses accounting for half of nonfarm, private real GDP,
  
• firms with fewer than 500 employees accounted for 64 percent (or 14.5 million) of the 22.5 million net new jobs (gains minus losses) between 1993 and the third quarter of 2008,
• an estimated 627,200 new employer firms began operation in 2008, and
  
• seven out of ten new employer firms last at least two years, and about half survive five years.

The Wall Street Journal has a really good article today on the topic of science, non-traditional data (non-survey based), and projects/methods for capturing the data as well as beginning to analyze.  I was first introduced to this topic by David Kirsch at the University of Maryland in a meeting with an official from the National Archives.  David, who has training as a historian but deals mostly in entrepreneurship and related topics, has done some very innovative work to secure interesting potential data from being lost.  Indeed, there should be a new call for research proposals coming out soon on some data which David helped to preserve.  I will post the call as soon as I see it officially released.  At some point it might be worth codifying some of what our scholarly community is learning here.  It strikes me that there are actually more people doing work here than I'd realized, including Jon Eckhardt from Wisconsin, and I suspect many scholars more from the industry studies community. 

August 29 ammendment: I neglected to hit one key point in my original post.  A huge amount of potentially helpful electronic data stands to be lost unless proactive steps are taken to preserve it. 

The 2nd European Conference on Intellectual Capital has posted a call for papers for several mini tracks, including one on entrepreneurial performance.  The abstract submission deadline is September 22, 2009.

One of the newer global developments in surveys is the Gallup World Poll.  While I can't find an exact starting point, I know that I have seen some data from the World Poll going back to 2005, although the data is only now making its way into academic and non-academic publications.

• Sample academic publication: Deaton, Angus 2008. "Income, Health, and Well-Being around the World: Evidence from the Gallup World Poll." Journal of Economic Perspectives, 22(2): 53–72.
• Sample non-academic publication: South Africans Optimistic About Local Entrepreneurship

Currently, Gallup reports at least bi-annual coverage on the core survey instrument for more than 150 countries.  The World Poll seems to have very promising possibilities for future research and policy work in entrepreneurship because Gallup is collecting data on entrepreneurship in several different portions of their instrument, including on general population perception questions like, "Is the city or area where you live a good place or not a good place for entrepreneurs forming new businesses," or "If someone wants to start a business in X, can they trust their assets and property to be safe at all times?"

Indeed the hardest part about Gallup's data is getting access as the current subscription price is quite substantial.  There is no doubt that they've put together a very powerful instrument and their execution seems as top-quality as we would expect from Gallup.  My main criticism of them thus far, and I've shared this directly, is that many of the questions focus mostly on the smallest of entrepreneurs or entry while what we are most lacking globally are real perceptions about growing businesses.  That said, if someone out there does end up subscribing to the data and needs coauthors, I know of several people who would be interested. 

When I first saw the term "shared capitalism" I was a little puzzled but the more I have looked into the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Shared Capitalism Project the more interesting I found it. Shared capitalism is defined  as "employment relations where the pay or wealth of workers is directly tied to workplace or firm performance."  Funded by the Russell Sage Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation and spanning more than 10 years, this project is just getting to the stage where you will soon see a finished University of Chicago publication.  But in the meantime, you can find many of the chapters of this book in near final versions online.  According to Joseph Blasi, one of the principals on the project:

The Introduction chapter which you can download at this web site (in the top position) will explain the project in some detail including the theoretical background, what we did, and our main empirical findings. In brief, we surveyed over 40,000 employees in 14 firms and hundreds of separate work sites and established a national random sample of the US working population using the General Social Survey (GSS) with a special shared capitalism set of questions on the 2002, 2006, and now 2010 GSS, as a control group.

In Appendix A, they define some of the terms that are common throughout the book.  I thought it appropriate to highlight how innovation outcomes were defined:

• Culture for Innovation: Mean of following items, all measured on a 1-4 scale (1=never or almost never, 2=sometimes, 3=often, 4=always or almost always) "How often do the following things occur in your facility?"
  

• Innovative Ideas: Mean of following items, all measured on a 1-4 scale (1=not at all, 2=very little, 3=to some extent, 4=to a great extent)

For some time, the debate in the survey research community about how to respond to the increasing nonrepresentativeness of phone line-based surveys has been raging, but based on data I read in the Economist which puts more than twenty percent of households in the United States as being "mobile only," I think this debate can only be getting ready to escalate.  The article has a much fuller presentation of the issues than I can offer, but it does raise in my mind the difficulty of pursuing any household surveys in the future which rely solely on random digit dialing.  In the past, efforts like the Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, have used such techniques to arrive at a representative sample of the U.S. population.  For efforts which are aimed at a business population, I suspect there is less of an issue as it is my suspicion that most businesses larger than a couple of employees still maintain some form of land line phone, although I don't believe we have data on that. 

Gallup has such wide-ranging survey reach and scope of goals that it seems there is always something new they have going on which I find interesting.  Today, I thought I'd highlight a portal for Gallup on "Business News" which I only happened on this week.  It's a real hodge podge of rolling materials including Gallup Daily Trends in things like job creation and destruction patterns that emerge through their surveys. 

A new deal announced in early August between National Venture Capital Association and Cambridge Associates for return data in venture capital (VC) world.  I am not an expert in VC data so I don't know the full ramifications of this but details should be of interest to many scholars.  It seems that this will broaden data available rather than have a significant impact on some of the more establish VC sources:

NFIB's summary of common questions about health insurance and small business.

At the recent Academy of Management meetings, I was lucky enough to attend a Professional Development Workshop on "Business Creation Panel Studies: an International Overview." Most of the data presented was looking at the concept of nascent entrepreneurship, but the Australian and Latvian presentations also dealt with some other populations.  There is a great deal of similarity among the different projects presented, as is apparent from the slides below; however, for a number of reasons the presenters seemed to feel that there was still room for international comparative research and perhaps, eventually, a harmonized data file. 

One of the most interesting parts of sitting in on this session for me was hearing the experience of each principal investigator in gathering support for their project, dealing with vendors, getting data, and then analysis.  Indeed, a couple of themes emerged across presenters which were of note on the pure logistics of organizing a panel survey.  This is my own summary, not something which was presented at the event:

1. Funding - Many of the organizers experienced exogenous shocks to their funding source in the course of carrying out the surveys.  Even without shocks, most of the principal investigators talked about the expensive nature of panel data collection and the importance of securing funding early.
2. Vendor - In all but one case, I believe, these panel surveys were collected using an outside vendor under direction from the academic principal investigator.  While it was not the case for each country, more than half seemed to have had some pretty significant vendor issues during the process.  Indeed several had switched vendors during the course of the panel data collection.
3. Sample - In each case, I don't think the principal investigators ever felt they were able to truly get a large enough sample of nascent entrepreneurs.  This is typically a function of cost and sheer difficulty of screening the adult population (or some other source) in order to find people in the process of starting a business.  

So, with thanks to the presenters in this session for their gracious permission to post the slides to Data Maven, here in the order they presented are the slides from the workshop. 

Business Creation Panel Studies: An International Status Report
Recent Overview Paper on Nascent Entrepreneurship
Australia
Canada
China
Latvia
Netherlands (Presented by Paul Reynolds)
Norway
Sweden
United States
Commentary