The next meeting of the NBER's Entrepreneurship Working Group will held on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 in Cambridge, MA as part of NBER's Summer Institute.  This will be the first time the Entrepreneurship Working Group has met during the Summer Institute and should provide good opportunity for researchers to be a part of NBER's larger activities (http://www.nber.org/callforpapers/call_si09.html).  Please note there will be no March meeting.

If you have a paper you would like to present, please send it or an abstract to me by e-mail (jlerner@hbs.edu), FAX (617-495-3817), or mail (Harvard Business School, Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, Room 214, Boston, MA 02163) by March 27.  I would also appreciate it if you could pass this call for papers on to colleagues who might be interested, but who may not be on the Bureau's mailing list.

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.

As we have developed more longitudinal data sets over recent years at Kauffman (Kauffman Firm Survey, Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, and the Integrated Longitudinal Business Database to name a few), it has become apparent that one of the areas which holds back research in entrepreneurship and innovation is not just access to data but the human capital skills of our research community in using new, increasingly complex data sets.  It's something we have and continue to struggle with as to what actions we can take to help break that research bottleneck.  Some of our Emerging Scholars Initiatives (Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship Program and NBER Entrepreneurship Research Bootcamp) but I have often wondered if some additional course offerings might be warranted.

That's a long-winded way of highlighting an upcoming one-day workshop being offered through the Chicago American Statistical Association at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business on longitudinal analysis.  If you are aware of other upcoming courses, please send them our way.   

• Friday, March 20 Short Course on Longitudinal Data Analysis
  https://s07.123signup.com/servlet/SignUp?PG=1531573182300&P=153157300
   

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. 

Over the last five years, the Kauffman Foundation has developed an exciting portfolio of projects measuring innovation and entrepreneurship, and perhaps even more importantly, a great network of people interested in these subjects.  Through this blog we hope to begin engaging an even broader audience of people interested in these topics.  As program officer for most of the Kauffman Foundation's grants dealing with entrepreneurship and innovation data, I, E.J. Reedy, will be the main author but others will also be contributing.  

A bit more about me...(from my official Kauffman bio)

"As a manager, E.J. Reedy oversees grants and conducts academic and policy research for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the field of entrepreneurship.  He has been significantly involved in the coordination of the Foundation’s entrepreneurship and innovation data-related initiatives, including the Kauffman Firm Survey and the Foundation’s multi-year series of symposiums on data, as well as many web-related projects and initiatives.  Reedy joined the Foundation in 2003. Prior to joining the Foundation, Reedy was a senior analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City and had extensive experience in non-profit management. Previously, he was financial director and executive co-director of the Center for Community Outreach at the University of Kansas in Lawrence."

A bit more about me that isn't on the bio...

I fell into the area of entrepreneurship and innovation data by accident.  One of the first meetings I ever attended when I started working for Bob Litan at the Kauffman Foundation was a meeting of academics to discuss what Kauffman should do in the area of data.  I was not an expert but soon found myself immersed in the topic and loving it.  Working to conceptualize and execute the Kauffman Firm Survey was my real introduction into survey-research, and I've loved it.   Over the years I have had the great pleasure to work with hundreds of grantees and contractors interested in understanding entrepreneurship and innovation better.  In 2006, we reorganized some program officer responsibilities and since that time I have been attempting to leverage the past and future investments that the Foundation makes in data, as well as to be a resource for the entrepreneurship and innovation research communities around data-issues (even for people we don't fund!).