Pre Entry Motives into Entrepreneurship and Post Entry Entrepreneurial Orientation

post-entry strategy, firm survival, Cox model

La géographie des centres d'appel en France

National audienceCall centers and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) well symbolisethe rise of an " information economy ". As IT-enabled services, call centers2could have been regarded as footloose. Actually, call centers take advantagefrom a large array of location factors, the most important being the availabilityof labour.The map of French call centers shows a strong, but irregular metropolitanpattern. A much finer analysis demonstrates that the closeness to Paris has beena strong location factor in the recent de-concentration process. In a first time,CRM firms have targeted medium cities in the surroundings of Paris, with astrong presence of universities, offering a well educated workforce. During thelast three years, these labour pools went to saturation. Thus, call centercompanies shifted to smaller or more remote cities, often with highunemployment rates.In such places, call center location has become a major tool for economicdevelopment, particularly in those which suffered from recent industrialdownturns. In order to attract call center-related investments, several localcommunities have established dedicated training programs and offer purposebuild,ready-for-delivery premises. Without mention of incentive packages.Nevertheless, "the driving effects" of CRM business are reportedly low.Spillover effects cannot be expected, because call center operations are highlytaylorian and require, on average, low skills. Moreover, CRM investments peremployee are small and easily movable. With respect to the rise of overseaslocations, call center perspectives for sustainable, local development seem tobe narrow. For local communities, focusing on call centers only would be adangerous bet.Les centres d'appels constituent une des activités émergentes de la nouvelleéconomie. Ils proposent au géographe une problématique intéressante : quelssont les facteurs de localisation d'établissements qui délivrent au client unservice à distance. La carte des implantations dans les aires urbaines françaises,comptabilisées par postes de travail, montre une répartition spatiale irrégulière,mais qui reste fortement métropolisée. Une analyse plus fine met en évidenceun processus de diffusion hiérarchique, à partir de la Capitale, puis vers lesmétropoles régionales, et enfin vers l'espace à dominante rurale. Ce processuscréé des opportunités de créations d'emploi. Les centres d'appels sont devenusla cible des politique locales de développement économique, et un outil dereconversion des bassins d'emploi en difficulté. Mais la croissance desdélocalisations outre-mer fait peser une menace sur ces activités nouvelles.La croissance des centres d'appels est un des phénomènes par lesquels lesterritoires entrent dans l'ère du " capitalisme cognitif ", dans un contexte deglobalisation et de métropolisation. Mais les effets dynamisants de cetteactivité fortement taylorienne sont incertains, et elle ne saurait en aucun casdevenir une mono-activité

Résilience d’un territoire face au chômage : les réseaux d’entreprises innovantes sur Montpellier

L’objectif de l’article est d’évaluer la résilience d’un territoire face à des perturbations économiques, ici l’aire urbaine de Montpellier, au travers de l’étude de la morphologie des réseaux d’entreprises locales. Pour réaliser cette analyse, nous avons mené un recensement des dépôts communs de brevets des entreprises innovantes locales. Cette approche a permis une modélisation de ces réseaux avec la théorie des graphes sur plusieurs plages temporelles. Au final, cette analyse permet de mettre en évidence au sein de ces réseaux locaux d’innovation le rôle joué par des entreprises-pivots dans la résilience d’un territoire, notamment en termes de pérennité de son tissu entrepreneurial innovant mais également de niveau d’emploi.The objective of the article is to evaluate the resiliency of a territory facing economical disruptions, (the urban area of Montpelier) through the study of the morphology of the networks of local businesses. To realize this analysis, we took a census of the common application for patents of the innovative local businesses. This approach allowed a modelling of these networks with the theory of graphs over several temporal zones. In the end, this analysis allows to forefront the role played by key-businesses in the resiliency of a territory, namely in terms of perennity of its innovative entrepreneurial fabric but also at the employment level

Inferring the unobserved human capital of entrepreneurs

The goal of this paper is to study the role of unobserved human capital in entrepreneurial choice and its impact on the survival of newly created firms. Our starting point is that, when starting a new business, an entrepreneur’s labor market situation (e.g. employed or not) reflects how his human capital may be valuated through salaried labor. This in turn affects the entrepreneurial decision so that, an entrepreneur’s human capital should be correlated with the state at which he decided to start a new firm. We illustrate this point with descriptive statistics computed from a survey of French startups. These statistics show that the impact of education on the new firm’s survival is most pronounced for firms created by individuals salaried in their preferred branch of activity while it is rather limited if the entrepreneur was in the wrong branch or newly unemployed. In this paper we argue, both theoretically and empirically, that these results may be explained by some unobserved heterogeneity in the entrepreneur’s human capital that is correlated both with the initial labor market situation and with some observable measures of human capital such as education or experience. We first present a simple model of entrepreneurial choice that provides predictions about an entrepreneur’s actual human capital as a function of human capital observed by the econometrician as well as the individual’s state in the labor market when the firm was created. The model allows for some information asymmetry on the labor market as well as other sources of inefficiencies such as incentive problems due to moral hazard. It also allows in a simple way for some dynamic considerations on the part of the entrepreneur regarding potential depreciation of his human capital. We argue that the data may be best explained by a model where employer’s information on employee’s human capital is sufficiently poor and where there is a strong concern about human capital depreciation for those with a high level of observed human capital. We then run some duration analysis on our data on new firms’ survival by estimating a proportional hazard Cox model with partial maximum likelihood. The estimation results are coherent with the descriptive statistics on the impact of education on survival for different initial states of the entrepreneur. This econometric analysis will be completed with additional regressions that allow for correcting for unobserved heterogeneity in order to evaluate its magnitude and nature. We have done some preliminary work where unobserved heterogeneity is modelled through random effects (frailties) for different subgroups of individuals according to education level and experience that have a gamma distribution. Our preliminary results show that there is significant unobserved heterogeneity but the estimates of the frailties are consistent with the results obtained by running a standard Cox estimation.Entrepreneurship, Labor Market, Human Capital Valuation, Information Asymmetries, Duration of the New Firm

What do innovation networks really do for local development?

We address the role of innovation networks on growth of territories in the Canadian space (TER WALL et BOSCHMA, 2009). We rely on an analysis of labor market areas for the period 1996 - 2008 on the basis of patent applications filed jointly by several inventors so as to develop the networks of cooperation. An analysis of such networks on the basis of these geography areas can provide some additional explanatories on the core-periphery model, which appears between the labor market areas that innovate and those that develop economically. The working hypothesis is therefore as follows. If technological change is undeniably the macro-economic factors of growth (ROMER, 1990), the level of flow of knowledge spillover between cities and particularly the degree of centrality of each of them within the collaborative network, has a differential impact on local economic development between urban areas (GORDON et McCANN, 2000). This working hypothesis is based on the observation that innovation at the local level does not necessarily lead to economic development of territories in which it operates

What Can be Learned Studying the Distribution of the Biggest Fragment ?

In the canonical formalism of statistical physics, a signature of a first order phase transition for finite systems is the bimodal distribution of an order parameter. Previous thermodynamical studies of nuclear sources produced in heavy-ion collisions provide information which support the existence of a phase transition in those finite nuclear systems. Some results suggest that the observable Z1 (charge of the biggest fragment) can be considered as a reliable order parameter of the transition. This talk will show how from peripheral collisions studied with the INDRA detector at GSI we can obtain this bimodal behaviour of Z1. Getting rid of the entrance channel effects and under the constraint of an equiprobable distribution of excitation energy (E*), we use the canonical description of a phase transition to link this bimodal behaviour with the residual convexity of the entropy. Theoretical (with and without phase transition) and experimental Z1-E* correlations are compared. This comparison allows us to rule out the case without transition. Moreover that quantitative comparison provides us with information about the coexistence region in the Z1-E* plane which is in good agreement with that obtained with the signal of abnormal uctuations of configurational energy (microcanonical negative heat capacity).Comment: 8 page

Chromosomal control of pig populations in France: 2002-2006 survey

The chromosomal control of pig populations has been widely developed in France over the last ten years. By December 31st, 2006, 13 765 individuals had been karyotyped in our laboratory, 62% of these since 2002. Ninety percent were young purebred boars controlled before service in artificial insemination centres, and 3% were hypoprolific boars. So far, 102 constitutional structural chromosomal rearrangements (67 since 2002) have been described. Fifty-six were reciprocal translocations and 8 peri- or paracentric inversions. For the first time since the beginning of the programme and after more than 11 000 pigs had been karyotyped, one Robertsonian translocation was identified in 2005 and two others in 2006. The estimated prevalence of balanced structural chromosomal rearrangements in a sample of more than 7700 young boars controlled before service was 0.47%. Twenty-one of the 67 rearrangements described since 2002 were identified in hypoprolific boars. All were reciprocal translocations. Twelve mosaics (XX/XY in 11 individuals, XY/XXY in one individual) were also diagnosed. Two corresponded to hypoprolific boars, and three to intersexed animals. The results presented in this communication would justify an intensification of the chromosomal control of French and, on a broader scale, European and North-American pig populations