Which firms do the entrepreneurs come from?

Entrepreneurs who found new firms tend to work as employees in small rather than large firms prior to start-up and have previous experience of entrepreneurship. We provide a model of self-selection based on heterogeneous risk preferences which can explain these stylized facts.

Intrapreneurship or Entrepreneurship?

I explore the factors that determine whether new business opportunities are exploited by starting a new venture for an employer ('nascent intrapreneurship') or independently ('nascent entrepreneurship'). Analysis of a nationally representative sample of American adults gathered in 2005-06 uncovers systematic differences between the drivers of nascent entrepreneurship and nascent intrapreneurship. Nascent entrepreneurs tend to leverage their general human capital and social ties to organize ventures which sell directly to customers, whereas intrapreneurs disproportionately commercialize unique new opportunities which sell to other businesses. Implications of the findings are discussed.nascent entrepreneurship, intrapreneurship, sample selection

Stratification bias in low signal microarray studies

BACKGROUND: When analysing microarray and other small sample size biological datasets, care is needed to avoid various biases. We analyse a form of bias, stratification bias, that can substantially affect analyses using sample-reuse validation techniques and lead to inaccurate results. This bias is due to imperfect stratification of samples in the training and test sets and the dependency between these stratification errors, i.e. the variations in class proportions in the training and test sets are negatively correlated. RESULTS: We show that when estimating the performance of classifiers on low signal datasets (i.e. those which are difficult to classify), which are typical of many prognostic microarray studies, commonly used performance measures can suffer from a substantial negative bias. For error rate this bias is only severe in quite restricted situations, but can be much larger and more frequent when using ranking measures such as the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and area under the ROC (AUC). Substantial biases are shown in simulations and on the van 't Veer breast cancer dataset. The classification error rate can have large negative biases for balanced datasets, whereas the AUC shows substantial pessimistic biases even for imbalanced datasets. In simulation studies using 10-fold cross-validation, AUC values of less than 0.3 can be observed on random datasets rather than the expected 0.5. Further experiments on the van 't Veer breast cancer dataset show these biases exist in practice. CONCLUSION: Stratification bias can substantially affect several performance measures. In computing the AUC, the strategy of pooling the test samples from the various folds of cross-validation can lead to large biases; computing it as the average of per-fold estimates avoids this bias and is thus the recommended approach. As a more general solution applicable to other performance measures, we show that stratified repeated holdout and a modified version of k-fold cross-validation, balanced, stratified cross-validation and balanced leave-one-out cross-validation, avoids the bias. Therefore for model selection and evaluation of microarray and other small biological datasets, these methods should be used and unstratified versions avoided. In particular, the commonly used (unbalanced) leave-one-out cross-validation should not be used to estimate AUC for small datasets

Realising Potential: Disability Confidence Builds Better Business

[Excerpt] ‘Realising potential’ sets out the latest thinking on how disabled people contribute to business success and how business, in the UK and globally, benefits from disability confidence. It provides the information senior business decision makers need to manage and profit from the disability dimension to key business trends: including an aging population, increasingly individualised customer relations, changing working patterns and enabling technology. Business must address the disability component of these trends and develop disability confidence if it is to compete in an increasingly complex environment and create value from difference. ‘Realising potential’ highlights the strategic, commercial, legal, societal, ethical, and professional benefits of getting it right on disability – the six building blocks of any business case for disability confidence

Transitions to Entrepreneurship and Industry-Specific Barriers

Drivers of entrepreneurial entry are investigated in this study by examining how entry into small-business ownership is shaped by industry-specific constraints. The human- and financial-capital endowments of potential entrepreneurs entering firms in various industries are shown to differ profoundly, depending on the type of venture entered. The educational credentials of highly educated potential entrepreneurs, in particular, predict avoidance of small-firm ownership in some industries as well as attraction to others. Recognizing that individuals choose an industry sector jointly with their decision to enter entrepreneurship, we find that the conventional practice of conflating different industry types in empirical analyses of transitions to entrepreneurship generates misleading findings about the determinants of entrepreneurship.entrepreneurship, self-employment, capital constraints, transitions, entry barriers, business start-ups

Unrhymed Modernity: New York City, the Popular Newspaper Page, and the Forms of Whitman\u27s Poetry

Explores Whitman\u27s experience with newspapers as a shaping force for his poetry and argues that newspapers offered not only a source for the content of his poems, but were also a dynamic influence on his poems\u27 vision, forms, and vocabulary

Unrhymed Modernity: New York City, the Popular Newspaper Page, and the Forms of Whitman\u27s Poetry

Explores Whitman\u27s experience with newspapers as a shaping force for his poetry and argues that newspapers offered not only a source for the content of his poems, but were also a dynamic influence on his poems\u27 vision, forms, and vocabulary

Risk management for drinking water safety in low and middle income countries: cultural influences on water safety plan (WSP) implementation in urban water utilities

We investigated cultural influences on the implementation of water safety plans (WSPs) using case studies from WSP pilots in India, Uganda and Jamaica. A comprehensive thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews (n = 150 utility customers, n = 32 WSP ‘implementers’ and n = 9 WSP ‘promoters’), field observations and related documents revealed 12 cultural themes, offered as ‘enabling’, ‘limiting’, or ‘neutral’, that influence WSP implementation in urban water utilities to varying extents. Aspects such as a ‘deliver first, safety later’ mind set; supply system knowledge management and storage practices; and non-compliance are deemed influential. Emergent themes of cultural influence (ET1 to ET12) are discussed by reference to the risk management, development studies and institutional culture literatures; by reference to their positive, negative or neutral influence on WSP implementation. The results have implications for the utility endorsement of WSPs, for the impact of organisational cultures on WSP implementation; for the scale-up of pilot studies; and they support repeated calls from practitioner communities for cultural attentiveness during WSP design. Findings on organisational cultures mirror those from utilities in higher income nations implementing WSPs – leadership, advocacy among promoters and customers (not just implementers) and purposeful knowledge management are critical to WSP success