3/31/2009 11:02:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Family-ownership of firms isn't something that we deal with a lot at Kauffman, but it's something that the larger field considers a part of entrepreneurship. As such, when I got an email inquiry today through our website on the subject and data available on family-owned firms, I decided to take a look. I didn't go far because for this type of thing, in the United States, there is really only one great source, the Survey of Business Owners. It's done every five years in conjunction with the Economic Census. The most recent released data is from 2002. And what I found really fascinated me:
Respondent firms 16,687,541 total - 4,091,884 employer firms; 12,595,657 non-employer firms
- Family-owned, yes: 23.4 percent overall – 28.1 percent for employer firms; 21.9 percent for non-employers
- Family-owned, no: 9.4 percent overall– 18.3 percent for employer firms; 6.5 percent for non-employers
- Family-owned, only one owner: 63.6 percent overall - 51.0 percent for employer firms; 67.7 percent for non-employers
- Family-owned, item not reported: 4.2 percent overall - 4.1 percent for employer firms; 4.2 percent for non-employers
Source: Table 4. http://www.census.gov/prod/ec02/sb0200cscb.pdf
I'm still getting used to tables, etc. on the blog so apologies for the clunkiness here, but the basic message I wanted to show was that it's really interesting that a majority of firms in the United States are single-owner firms and yet these firms predominantly respond that they are "family-owned". By my reading of the above, 87 percent of firms responded that they were family-owned. Even close to 80 percent of employer firms reported being family-owned.
3/31/2009 5:51:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The FIRB-RISC CONFERENCE, organized by CESPRI (Centre of Research on Innovation and Internationalization) is seeking papers on an upcoming conference with theme “Research and entrepreneurship in the knowledge-based economy”.
September 7-8, 2009
KITeS-Cespri, Bocconi University
Milan, Italy
I wanted to highlight that organizers are specifcally seeking papers that look at things like investments in intangible assets or innovation while looking at entrepreneurship.
3/30/2009 8:29:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Last week, I received an email from the the National Association of Seed and Venture Funds. In the email, the group talks of "taking a proactive approach to encouraging government entities to understand the value of offering incentives for early stage investment." As such, they are doing two surveys on surveymonkey "to provide government officials and the media with information to support the need for increased early stage capital." One survey was focused on the investor and one the professional support organization. Given the audience of for this blog, I thought I'd pass along the professional support survey link, in case it applicable to readers. This survey is obviously not meant to be very scientific, but if nothing else, readers can benefit from seeing the questions which are being asked.
Professional Support Survey - This survey is for professional service providers, university/federal technology transfer groups and economic development professionals.
Everyone benefits through strong participation and we will share the results with those who participated. Any questions, please e-mail Marc Kramer at mkramer@nasvf.org.
3/27/2009 3:32:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
It's not a top-tier publication, to my knowledge, but the special issue on "Ethnicity, Cultural Diversity and Entrepreneurship" from the Global Business and Economics Review might be of interest to scholars looking at differential entrepreneurship experiences by demographic. We continue to find big differences across different demographic groups in the United States in their entrepreneurial experiences such as recent articles touching on immigration or the litany of research looking at different minority populations from venture capital to broader research on minority entrepreneurship.
3/26/2009 6:35:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The National Science Foundation has announced a call for proposals looking at the implementation of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The call recognizes the natural experimental situation for studying the science of science and innovation policy activities as a result of this large shock. Read the actual call or find out more about the NSF application process.
3/26/2009 2:47:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
There has been a fairly strong debate among many funding agencies and top-tier academic institutions about scholarly publications and access issues over the last few years. Last fall, I heard an interesting interview on National Public Radio's Science Friday podcast concerning the National Institute of Health's efforts to make research they funded open-access. From my dealings with with the Social Science Research Network to promote dissemination of academic publications on entrepreneurship (see Entrepreneurship Research and Policy Network), I suspected that efforts to push open-access publication are likely to be dealt with at the disciplinary level and that the mores of the each discipline in adopting norms are extremely different.
Yesterday, I saw a new announcement from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which has caused me to wonder if open-access is reaching a tipping point that could sweep across academia. MIT's release of a campus-wide, open-access publication model for its faculty's research has the potential to cascade across the U.S. and the globe. MIT, with its diversity of strengths in academic research, would seem an ideal place to begin such a domino effect. You can read their actual policy or a good overview article on the whole process at ars technica.
One thing I didn't see specified in the MIT policy that I will be interested to find clarification on is how MIT plans to treat the underlying research data which scholarly publications are based upon. This has been a murky area in Economics, but less so in other disciplines, and how the university treats the research data could have other significant implications. MIT's libraries have a page devoted to open data, which do give an overview of some of the big players in this area but I diddn't see reference to open data in their policy.
3/25/2009 6:12:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Association of Public Data Users (APDU) is hosting an online presentation on “The 2010 Census: Preparations for a Complete Count” on Tuesday April 14th, 2009, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm EDT. Daniel Weinberg, Assistant Director for American Community Survey and Decennial Census, U.S. Census Bureau, will be presenting. Registration is necessary. Contact Denise M. Bosmans.
While the decennial census doesn't have a lot of direct application to entrepreneurship or innovation, it relates to so many things in the statistical infrastructure it is important to be aware of.
3/25/2009 5:42:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
3/17/2009 9:36:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Andrew Reamer at the Brookings Institution has a new piece out overviewing what he sees as an economic measurement system in the United States that is in need of additional investment. We are a funder of some of this work so it should come as no surprise that I am in concurrence with most of the points he makes, but even beyond what he presents, I think most of us would recognize a deficeit in our public knowledge. Even at the national level, which in theory by the way our systems are constructed should be the most accurate and timely, recent economic releases continue to undergo huge adjustments. For an example, just look to recent GDP numbers. This is a big topic and an important topic, not only for policy makers but for businesses who rely upon accurate and timely data for forecasting and making decisions on markets to enter, etc.
3/16/2009 5:34:00 AM By
E.J. Reedy
Thursday and Friday of last week, we sponsored a workshop with the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. I was not able to attend, but the topic was one of great interest to everyone now - entrepreneurial finance. While the final proceedings from the event will come out in a special issue of Journal of Money, Credit and Banking sometime next year, working paper versions of all presentations are available on the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland's website.
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Developing better data is part of Kauffman's long-term strategy for advancing better research and policy on entrepreneurship and innovation. Data Maven is place you can connect with new data developments, provide us feedback on possible new projects, and contribute to the community seeking to improve entrepreneurship and innovation measurement.
E.J. Reedy is a manager in Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. Learn more ...
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