Realities of long-term post investment performance for venture-backed enterprises

This paper constructs a model of long-run performance for SMEs that have received venture capital backing. The model explains performance by financial structure. FAME data are used for estimating performance equations over the period 1989 to 2004 for UK businesses in their post-investment period. The econometrics uses robust techniques, including least absolute error (LAE) and Tukey trimean estimation. It is shown that the key determinants of performance (measured by ROSF) are profit margins and risk, with lesser, but significant, roles played by liquidity and gearing. The sample is used to identify consistently high performers, and chronic low performers. From the latter group, two detailed case studies illustrate how chronic low performance can emerge, in each case caused by failure to achieve technological milestones, and thereby failing, ultimately, to convince investors of potential company worth

Practitioner views on financial reporting for smaller entities

This paper has four purposes. First, to establish the policy background leading to a special financial reporting standard for small firms (FRSSE), aimed at reducing compliance costs. An indirect policy implication of this was that small firms would be stimulated, for example, in terms of start-up rate, performance (including survival rate, and profitability, and growth), and contribution to employment and innovation within the economy. Second, to consider the implications for FRSSE itself on compliance costs, and to ask what forms they may take. Third, to analyse new evidence on adopters and non-adopters of the FRSSE. Fourth, to cast this new evidence into a cost effectiveness framework, to judge whether adopters who engage in upgrading of skills to implement the FRSSE had attained a net benefit as compared to non-adopters. The conclusion, based on this preliminary evidence, is that upgrading of skills to implement the FRSSE has indeed led to a significant net benefit

Co-evolution of Information Systems in Fast-Growing Small Firms

The paper examines the co-evolution of different dimensions of information systems for a sample of fast-growing small firms. The investigation uses primary source longitudinal empirical evidence. The data are taken from a large database on the lifecycle experience of one-hundred-and-fifty new business starts over a four-year period. They were collected by face to face interviews with owner-managers of small entrepreneurial firms. Interviews were conducted using an administered questionnaire that covered the agenda of markets, finance, costs, business strategy, the development of a management information system, human capital, organisation and technical change. This work uses primarily the data on management information systems. The basic approach used is to compare the attributes of the fastest and slowest paced firms, as identified by their growth rates. We then examine the evolution of these firms' management information systems. The measures used to identify changes in systems include: capital investment techniques, such as return on investment, residual income, net present value, internal rate of return and payback period; methods for managing costs, like just-in-time management, activity-based costing, quantitative risk analysis, value analysis, strategic pricing and transfer pricing; and using computer applications for storing information, project appraisal, financial modelling, forecasting and sensitivity analysis. 'Time lines' are graphed to show the points at which various features of information systems are introduced (e.g. data storage, forecasting, sensitivity analysis), and derived techniques (e.g. ROI, ABC) implemented. Firms are dichotomised into highgrowth and low-growth groups. Comparisons are made within firms and across firms in terms of the co-evolution of different aspects of their accounting information systems

Venture capital investor behaviour in the backing of UK high technology firms : financial reporting and the level of investment

This paper is an empirical investigation into the ways in which venture capitalists value (and invest in) high technology firms, focusing on financial reporting, risk disclosure and intangible assets. It is based on questionnaire returns from UK investors in diverse sectors, ranging from biotechnology, through software/ computer services, to communications and medical services. This evidence is used to examine: (a) the usefulness of financial accounts; (b) the implications of technopole investment; (c) the extent of investor control over the investee's AIS; and (d) the role of investor opinion (e.g. on disclosure, due diligence and risk reporting) in determining the level of equity provision

Venture capital and risk in high-technology enterprises

We find UK investors and entrepreneurs are significantly concordant in rankings of investments and key factors for risk but significantly discordant on risk classes. Investors emphasise agency risk (e.g., motivation, empowerment, alignment), and entrepreneurs emphasise business risk (e.g., market opportunities)

Data doxa: The affective consequences of data practices

This paper explores the embedding of data producing technologies in people's everyday lives and practices. It traces how repeated encounters with digital data operate to naturalise these entities, while often blindsiding their agentive properties and the ways they get implicated in processes of exploitation and governance. I propose and develop the notion of ‘data doxa’ to conceptualise the way in which digital data – and the devices and platforms that stage data – have come to be perceived in Western societies as normal, necessary and enabling. The ‘data doxa’ concept also accentuates the enculturation of many individuals into a data sharing habitus which frames digital technologies in simplistic terms as (a) panaceas for the problems associated with contemporary life, (b) figures of progress and convenience, and (c) mediums of knowledge, pleasure and identity. I suggest that three types of data-based relations contribute to the formation of this doxic sensibility: fetishisation, habit and enchantment. Each of these relations come to mediate public understandings of digital devices and the data they generate, obscuring the multifaceted nature and hidden depths of data and their propensity to double up as technologies of exposure and discipline. As a result of this situation, imaginative educational programs and revamped regulatory frameworks are urgently needed to inform individuals about the contribution of data to the leveraging of value and power in today's digital economies, but also to protect them from experiencing data-based harms

Ethnography in Post-Franco Spain: the View of an Outsider

Les habituals dificultats de fer treball de camp en un lloc nou es devien a dos factors: la natura de la informació antropològica sobre l’Espanya rural disponible fora del país i la molt limitada intercomunicació sobre qüestions polítiques en l’esfera pública durant els primers anys de la Transició. L’article descriu les discussions antropològiques que es produïen en l’època del treball de camp i proposa que un llarg període previ de repressió selectiva explica les diferents maneres com els informants parlaven del passat històric i del present polític. The usual difficulties of doing fieldwork in a new site were compounded by two factors: the nature of the kind of anthropological information about rural Spain available outside the country; and the very limited amount of intercommunication in the public sphere concerning political issues in the early years of the Transition. The article describes the discussions taking place in anthropology at the time of the fieldwork, and proposes that a long prior period of selective repression explains the differing ways in which informants spoke of the historical past and the political present.Las habituales dificultades de hacer trabajo de campo en un nuevo lugar se debían a dos factores: la naturaleza de la información antropológica sobre la España rural disponible fuera del país y la limitadísima intercomunicación sobre cuestiones políticas en la esfera pública durante los primeros años de la Transición. El artículo describe las discusiones antropológicas que se producían en la época del trabajo de campo y propone que un largo período previo de represión selectiva explica los distintos modos en que los informantes hablaban del pasado histórico y del presente político.

Student Ensemble: University Band and Symphonic Band

Center for the Performing ArtsApril 21, 2016Thursday Evening8:00 p.m