11/5/2009 2:46:08 PM By
E.J. Reedy
We (and I mean the big we, not just Kauffman) are obsessed with jobs right now, and rightfully so. While the economy appears to be turning a corner, unemployment continues at stubbornly high rates. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) should be out with
updated unemployment statistics within the next few days but several private sector reports on jobs came through more positive (see
Wall Street Journal article for a good summary of these statistics).
At Kauffman, we have been digging into jobs data over the last couple of months thanks to some special tabulations from the Census Bureau. Today, Kauffman released the first
white paper in a series which will attempt to make sense of these tabulations as well as a host of other data becoming available from BLS, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Eurostat. The current paper attempts to make the point that young firms (many of which are small) not just small businesses, generally, are the most active net job creators in the United States.
Haltiwanger, Jarmin, and Miranda find similar things in a working paper analysis using similar data sources.
11/3/2009 12:45:45 PM By
E.J. Reedy
Global Entrepreneurship Week 2009 is almost here so I wanted to take a minute to highlight some of the more common sources on international data about entrepreneurship.
Scott Shane had a nice posting on the NY Times blog last week using the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey. Currently the last data from that project was collected at the beginning of 2008. The World Bank will be collecting two more years of data beginning in 2010. The data currently cover approximately one hundred countries. The data is not fully comparable across countries but it attempts to encourage comparability by looking at only one type of business registration, limited liability corporations, which the authors contend is the most consistent legal form across countries. Also
see upcoming event at the World Bank.
The
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development will be releasing data next week on 23 economies. Drawing official data from national statistical offices, the OECD tabulations are of most interest for the study of developed economies but get into many aspects of growth firms like gazelle firms and high-growth firms in the economy.
Last week, the Legatum Institute put out a new version of their
Prosperity Index (which has an entrepreneurship component). According to their most recent index, “Entrepreneurs at the micro level need good economic policies at the macro level. Innovation and entrepreneurship are more strongly related to economic fundamentals than any other factor in a society. Aspiring entrepreneurs will often hit a 'ceiling' limiting their success if a nation’s economy is not fundamentally strong.” There isn't anything there I would disagree with. I am having some trouble finding the data details in their current report but as I remember, for many of their items, they rely on data from the Gallup World Poll, but interestingly entrepreneurship is not one of those items. The Gallup World Poll does have some data available on entrepreneurship, although it is not as readily available as other sources. A
case study in what Gallup collects on many countries is included in this write-up on South Africa.
And lastly, the
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) continues to collect data on nascent entrepreneurship and some other aspects of entrepreneurship. In our experience, countries must be aware of country-level quality issues related to the vendors which were used in collection but these data remain useful in some areas of cross-country study.
8/12/2009 11:18:21 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Back in July the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the U.S. Census Bureau hosted a two day seminar on turning statistics into knowledge. The PowerPoints and speakers from the event are
now available online for those wanting to explore data visualization or other aspects of making knowledge more approachable.
8/11/2009 10:28:06 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Alicia Robb, Denny Dennis, and I did a
Professional Development Workshop at the Academy of Management a couple of days ago. Here I am posting the slides from that workshop, which focused on data available for entrepreneurship research, along with notes from my comments at the event, which I had not put into slides.
Alicia Robb, Kauffman Foundation and University of California, Santa Cruz
Denny Dennis, NFIB
E.J. Reedy, Kauffman Foundation
Additionally, at the meeting, hard copies of the
proceedings of the 2007 Kauffman Symposium on Entrepreneurship and Innovation Data were handed out. Additional copies were requested by some but
electronic versions of each paper are available on line. The
2008 proceedings, which focused on ideas for improving data are also available.
And lastly, we highlighted a few ways in which scholars could connect with Kauffman and other scholars in this area. There is this blog,
Data Maven, for tracking data developments. On Facebook, join the
Kauffman Entrepreneurship Scholars group. Subscribe to
entrepreneurship emails from Social Science Research Network. Or participate in
Kauffman's emerging scholars programs.
7/3/2009 4:59:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
We are supporters of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's (OECD) Entrepreneurship Indicators Program (EIP). Last week, the steering group for the EIP met at Kauffman for one of their annual meetings. While not all the details of the meeting will be of interest, I thought I'd highlight a few key points that came out of the meeting with wider implications. These notes are abstracted from the official minutes. If you have contacts at a national statistical office and can encourage them to consider providing statistics for this program, please contact Koen DeBacker at the OECD.
Country Coverage
The 2008 Digest publication presented data for 18 countries; new data on additional countries will be included in the 2009 publication (Portugal, Sweden, Slovenia, maybe Israel). Continued efforts will be undertaken to broaden the coverage of the EIP, not only to OECD countries, but also to emerging/developing countries (UNCTAD, for example) and regions (e.g. Andalucia in Spain, region in China).
It is agreed that:
- Interested countries and regions can opt for a ‘light’ version of the EIP: not providing all the indicators, and if necessary to provide indicators that do not follow the definitions based on business registers and hence may not be completely comparable; published results should clearly indicate the differences in methodology;
- Richard Seymour will provide the OECD the results of an exercise about entrepreneurship indicators in developing countries;
Indicators of Entrepreneurial Determinants
In addition to the work on indicators of entrepreneurial performance, the EIP plans to undertake more work on indicators of entrepreneurial determinants during the coming year. This line of work will be different since national statistical offices (NSOs) have limited data on entrepreneurial determinants, and hence different sources have to be analysed and new definitions might have to be drafted.
It is agreed that:
- The work will differ across determinants; for each determinants the available evidence has to be analysed; if available data are insufficient, new definitions and indicators might have to be constructed; The OECD will draft a strategy how to tackle the different determinants;
- If possible, countries are asked to provide help and resources; additional budget could be sought from new funders on specific topics;
- It is suggested to include the complete interactive list (to be updated on a regular basis) of indicators on the EIP-website, while publications will only include a subset; the quality of the indicators has to be assessed and reported on;
- Countries are asked to send the OECD the results (if any) of the work already undertaken on possible indicators of entrepreneurial determinants (e.g. FORA Quality Assessment).
More Timely Indicators
In the light of the financial/economic crisis, the EIP has received a significant number of questions to include more timely indicators on entrepreneurship. Given that the EIP results are validated by NSOs, existing data are of high quality but less timely.
It is agreed that:
- Maximal efforts should be undertaken to include some more timely indicators in the next publication;
- Since NSOs are not really interested/equipped to do this, some creative effort within the EIP is needed;
- The objective is not to ‘forecast’ the existing indicators; rather (more timely) data series that are highly correlated with extisting indicators might be presented;
- Priority should be given to entry, employment created by new firms and exit (although larger time lag);
New Publication
A new publication of the EIP is planned by the end of 2009; it will have the same format as the 2008 Digest but will also include indicators on entrepreneurial determinants in addition to entrepreneurial performance. A selection of available and qualitative indicators on determinants will be included.
2/26/2009 3:23:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
There is little doubt to me that those of us following innovation measurement are patent obsessed, but that's not often because we want to be. But as much as we talk about moving away from patents, patents are relatively easy to get data on and as such patents remain the dominant source of data used to look at innovation by academics around the world. The OECD Patent Statistics Manual is a primer for anyone looking to use patents as an indicator. Check out their newly revised edition on the OECD's patent statistics page.
Chapter 1. Objectives and Scope of the Manual
Chapter 2. Patents as Statistical Indicators of Science and Technology
Introduction | Legal foundations of patents | Administrative routes for protection | Economic foundations of patents | The information content of patent documents | Patents as statistical indicators of inventive activity | Patent databases | Topics of investigation
Chapter 3. Patent Systems and Procedures
Introduction | The core patenting procedure | National and regional procedures | International patent applications
Chapter 4. Basic Criteria for Compiling Patent-Based Indicators
Introduction | Reference date | Reference country | PCT applications | Patent families | Normalised country-level patent indicators
Chapter 5. Classifying Patents by Different Criteria
Introduction | Technology fields | Industry classification | Regional classification | Institutional sectors | Patents by companies | Patents by investors
Chapter 6. The Use and Analysis of Citations in Patents
Introduction | What are citations? | Uses and applications of citations indicators | Citation practices in patent offices | Citation-based indicators | Non-patent literature | Other indicators based citation categories (EPO and PCT search reports)
Chapter 7. Indicators of Internationalisation of Science and Technology
Introduction | Indicators | Ownership and research strategies
Chapter 8. Indicators of Patent Value
Introduction | Forward citations | Indicators
2/26/2009 3:02:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The U.S. Census Bureau and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development are holding a seminar on July 15 and 16, 2009, on
Innovative Approaches to Turn Statistics into Knowledge. While there isn't much detail available on their website yet, the event looks interesting enough for me to have added as a tentative on my calendar. While some companies have jumped in to take previously unusable data and make it usable knowledge (Google comes to mind most prominently), much room remains for improvement and leverage of our existing knowledge. Most of my focus in recent years has been on finding ways to leverage the data we have collected through additional research, but the next step of translation is perhaps more important and difficult to crack.
2/24/2009 2:38:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has released a new beta service called
Key Tables. It's an attempt to make their most frequently requested tabular statistics available in an easier-to-use central place. I've often been frustrated by their
Source OECD service, which has seemed overwhelming and confusing to me in past attempts to use. In browsing their site today, it looks as if Source OECD is also getting a remake and introducing a new premium product,
OECD.Stat, as a part of a larger initiative to
increase dissemination of their statistics. It'd be great to hear how users of some of these new services are finding the products.
1/7/2009 6:52:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
For the past four years, the Danish government (partially through a contract with the OECD) has been putting together an assessment manual of entrepreneurship measures across countries. It's a pretty straight forward exercise but one I think really helpful for most policymakers and new scholars. The documents stated purpose is to: "First, it aims at providing a comprehensive overview of all available policy relevant indicators relating to entrepreneurship. Second, it rates the quality of each of these indicators in order to enable policy makers to evaluate the quality of policy analysis based on a given set of indicators. Third, the overview combined with the framework can serve as a starting point for future indicator development to ensure new indicators address issues that are need-to-know for policy purposes."
If you haven't taken a look at this report from FORA, it's definitely worth your time. Read the full November 2008 report.