Immigrant entrepreneurs continue to be a hot topic for study (see posting from February), but recently came across a survey in Mexico that I would like to highlight.  According to the Mexican Family Life Survey (MxFLS) website, "MxFLS is the first Mexican survey with national representation departing from a longitudinal design, tracking the Mexican population for long periods of time regardless of migration decisions with the objective of studying the dynamics of economy, demographics, epidemiology, and population migration throughout this panel study of at least, a 10-year span."  The Mexican Family Life Survey has collected two waves of data on more than eight thousand households with a ninety percent rate of recontact between 2002 and 2005.  Additionally, the survey appears to be agnostic to relocation decisions of the participating households, in particular, reporting to continue to follow households which relocate to the United States. 

I applaud the organizers of this effort for their ambition and hope that the data collected can help to shed light on immigrant entrepreneurship.  One of the common criticisms of research in this area is the inability to track previous job activities before immigration occurs and to compare that to later job activities.  Tracking people across such long distances and for such a length of time should prove very interesting indeed. 

Special thanks to a colleague, Cristina Fernandez, who helped with some research and translation on this post.

A call for papers has been issued for the Gender, Work & Organization 6th International Interdisciplinary Conference to be held June 21-23, 2010.  This conference provides an international forum for debate and analysis of a variety of issues in relation to gender studies.  A special call has been issued on the topic of entrepreneurship, innovation, and growth.  Deadline: November 1, 2009.

Second, the Diana Project, a project designed to illuminate aspects of women's entrepreneurship, will be holding a conference on August 3-4, 2010 and has issued a call for papers. 

The Clemson University, College of Charleston, and George Mason University are hosting a two-day symposium on business creation in Washington, DC, on October 23-24, 2009.  This event will include research that focuses on nascent entrepreneurship, with a large number of studies that utilize the Panel Study on Entrepreneurial Dynamics, as well as other research on the early years of a business.  A special half-day session will be held in Chinese. 

The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has released 2008 statistics on Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by metropolitan area nearly a year ahead of previous schedules.  Just two years ago, this program was on the chopping block because of budget cuts, but today, it seems hard to fathom that this data would not be available.  The discontinuation of GDP statistics by metro area will in my estimation mark one of the low points in federal economic statistics.  Many local economic development officials desperately need more timely local data and should be pleased with this development.  The recession is having very different effects on local economies and this data helps to illuminate some of that picture.  That said, acceleration will come with some costs to accuracy.  Here is more on the methodological change from their press release:  

The 2008 American Community Survey (ACS) is now available from Census.  It includes some limiited information on occupation and work status over the last year, including self-employment. 

Stanford has issued a call for papers on an important issue - privacy - which is intriguing in that it mirrors many of the concepts which the Obama administration raised in their recent innovation white paper released this week about balancing data privacy concerns and openness as a means of encouraging new business activity.  Read the full call. 

The Journal of Innovation and Best Business Practices has issued a call for papers for a special issue on "R&D, Innovation and Management: The Road to Organizational Success."

• overview of R&D and its Role in Industry, Government, and Academia
• creativity and Innovation in R&D
• strategies for the Management of R&D People
• strategies for the Management of R&D Resources
• strategies for Managing R&D Environments
• the Future of R&D and the R&D of the Future
• regulatory issues involved in the Management of R&D
• the management of new product development
• challenges of technological innovation
• case studies of projects based on R&D
  

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.