SBIR/STTR at the National Institutes of Health National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Policy and Global Affairs; Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy ...
11/2015
eBook
Open access
The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs provide federal research and development funding to small businesses. In 2008, the National ...Research Council completed a comprehensive assessment of the SBIR and STTR programs. The first-round study found that the programs were "sound in concept and effective in practice." Building on the outcomes from the Phase I study, this second phase examines both topics of general policy interest that emerged during the first phase and topics of specific interest to individual agencies, and provides a second snapshot to measure the program's progress against its legislative goals.
In the 1960s and '70s, a diverse range of storefronts-including head shops, African American bookstores, feminist businesses, and organic grocers-brought the work of the New Left, Black Power, ...feminism, environmentalism, and other movements into the marketplace. Through shared ownership, limited growth, and democratic workplaces, these activist entrepreneurs offered alternatives to conventional profit-driven corporate business models. By the middle of the 1970s, thousands of these enterprises operated across the United States-but only a handful survive today. Some, such as Whole Foods Market, have abandoned their quest for collective political change in favor of maximizing profits.Vividly portraying the struggles, successes, and sacrifices of these unlikely entrepreneurs,From Head Shops to Whole Foodswrites a new history of social movements and capitalism by showing how activists embraced small businesses in a way few historians have considered. The book challenges the widespread but mistaken idea that activism and political dissent are inherently antithetical to participation in the marketplace. Joshua Clark Davis uncovers the historical roots of contemporary interest in ethical consumption, social enterprise, buying local, and mission-driven business, while also showing how today's companies have adopted the language-but not often the mission-of liberation and social change.
What do Tetra aquarium supplies, Elector-Nite sensors, and Nissha touch panels have in common? They are typical 'hidden champions,' medium-sized, unknown companies (with annual revenues under $4 ...billion) that have quietly, under the radar, become world market leaders in their respective industries. Hermann Simon has been studying these hidden champions for over 20 years, and in this sequel to his worldwide bestseller, Hidden Champions, he explores the dramatic impact of globalization on these companies and their outstanding international success. Going deep inside more than a thousand hidden champions around the world, Simon reveals the common patterns, behaviors, and approaches that make these companies successful, and, in many cases, able to sustain world market leadership for generations, despite intense competition, financial pressures, and constantly evolving market dynamics. In the tradition of In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, and Good to Great, Simon identifies the factors in business operations, customer service and marketing, innovation, human resources management, organizational design, leadership, and strategy that separate these outstanding performers from the rest of the pack – and from the large corporations of the day. In the process, he provides a glimpse behind the curtains of many secretive companies who buck today’s management fads, and succeed instead through such common-sense strategies as focusing on core capabilities, delivering real value to the customer, establishing long-term relationships, innovating continuously, rewarding employees for performance, decentralized operations, and developing an unparalleled global presence. Hidden champions teach us that good management means doing many small things better than the competition—quietly, with determination, commitment, and never-ending stamina.
Products and services created by small and medium sized organizations account for the vast majority of economic activity across the globe. These organizations will prove vitally important to the ...emerging and developing economies that will shape future decades.
Small Business Management in Cross-Cultural Environments is one of very few books to take the cross-cultural context as an opportunity to analyse and discuss the key concepts of small firm management in different parts of the world. This textbook covers important topics, such as:
the global economic development process
entrepreneurship
the role of government
SME growth and collaborations in a global context.
By explaining how culture shapes and conditions the reality of small businesses and how organizational theories and models fail as management tools, this book fills a significant gap. Supplemented by a compendium of compelling case studies, drawn from across the world, and based upon 25 years of international research by the author, Small Business Management in Cross-Cultural Environments is a useful guide for students and practitioners of SME and International Management
David Stockman, Ronald Reagan's budget director, proclaimed the Small Business Administration a "billion-dollar waste -- a rathole," and set out to abolish the agency. His scathing critique was but ...the latest attack on an agency better known as the "Small Scandal Administration." Loans to criminals, government contracts for minority "fronts," the classification of American Motors as a small business, Whitewater, and other scandals -- the Small Business Administration has lurched from one embarrassment to another.
Despite the scandals and the policy failures, the SBA thrives and small business remains a sacred cow in American politics. Part of this sacredness comes from the agency's longstanding record of pioneering affirmative action. Jonathan Bean reveals that even before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the SBA promoted African American businesses, encouraged the hiring of minorities, and monitored the employment practices of loan recipients. Under Nixon, the agency expanded racial preferences. During the Reagan administration, politicians wrapped themselves in the mantle of minority enterprise even as they denounced quotas elsewhere.
Created by Congress in 1953, the SBA does not conform to traditional interpretations of interest-group democracy. Even though the public -- and Congress -- favors small enterprise, there has never been a unified group of small business owners requesting the government's help. Indeed, the SBA often has failed to address the real problems of "Mom and Pop" shop owners, fueling the ongoing debate about the agency's viability.
Thirteen million people in the United States--roughly one in ten workers--own a business. And yet rates of business ownership among African Americans are much lower and have been so throughout the ...twentieth century. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, businesses owned by African Americans tend to have lower sales, fewer employees and smaller payrolls, lower profits, and higher closure rates. In contrast, Asian American-owned businesses tend to be more successful. In Race and Entrepreneurial Success, minority entrepreneurship authorities Robert Fairlie and Alicia Robb examine racial disparities in business performance. Drawing on the rarely used, restricted-access Characteristics of Business Owners (CBO) dataset compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, Fairlie and Robb examine in particular why Asian-owned firms perform well in comparison to white-owned businesses and black-owned firms typically do not. They also explore the broader question of why some entrepreneurs are successful and others are not.. After providing new comprehensive estimates of recent trends in minority business ownership and performance, the authors examine the importance of human capital, financial capital, and family business background in successful business ownership. They find that a high level of startup capital is the most important factor contributing to the success of Asian-owned businesses, and that the lack of startup money for black businesses (attributable to the fact that nearly half of all black families have less than $6,000 in total wealth) contributes to their relative lack of success. In addition, higher education levels among Asian business owners explain much of their success relative to both white- and African American-owned businesses. Finally, Fairlie and Robb find that black entrepreneurs have fewer opportunities than white entrepreneurs to acquire valuable pre-business work experience through working in family businesses.
As the breadth and empirical diversity of entrepreneurship research have increased rapidly during the last decade, the quest to find a "one-size-fits-all" general theory of entrepreneurship has given ...way to a growing appreciation for the importance of contexts. This promises to improve both the practical relevance and the theoretical rigor of research in this field. Entrepreneurship means different things to different people at different times and in different places and both its causes and its consequences likewise vary. For example, for some people entrepreneurship can be a glorious path to emancipation, while for others it can represent the yoke tethering them to the burdens of overwork and drudgery. For some communities it can drive renaissance and vibrancy while for others it allows only bare survival. In this book, we assess and attempt to push forward contemporary conceptualizations of contexts that matter for entrepreneurship, pointing in particular to opportunities generating new insights by attending to contexts in novel or underexplored ways.
This book shows that the ongoing contextualization of entrepreneurship research should not simply generate a proliferation of unique theories – one for every context – but can instead result in better theory construction, testing and understanding of boundary conditions, thereby leading us to richer and more profound understanding of entrepreneurship across its many forms.
Contextualizing Entrepreneurship Theory will critically review the current debate and existing literature on contexts and entrepreneurship and use this to synthesize new theoretical and methodological frameworks that point to important directions for future research.
America has a long tradition of middle-class radicalism, albeit one that intellectual orthodoxy has tended to obscure.The Radical Middle Classseeks to uncover the democratic, populist, and even ...anticapitalist legacy of the middle class. By examining in particular the independent small business sector or petite bourgeoisie, using Progressive Era Portland, Oregon, as a case study, Robert Johnston shows that class still matters in America. But it matters only if the politics and culture of the leading player in affairs of class, the middle class, is dramatically reconceived.
This book is a powerful combination of intellectual, business, labor, medical, and, above all, political history. Its author also humanizes the middle class by describing the lives of four small business owners: Harry Lane, Will Daly, William U'Ren, and Lora Little. Lane was Portland's reform mayor before becoming one of only six senators to vote against U.S. entry into World War I. Daly was Oregon's most prominent labor leader and a onetime Socialist. U'Ren was the national architect of the direct democracy movement. Little was a leading antivaccinationist.
The Radical Middle Classfurther explores the Portland Ku Klux Klan and concludes with a national overview of the American middle class from the Progressive Era to the present. With its engaging narrative, conceptual richness, and daring argumentation, it will be welcomed by all who understand that reexamining the middle class can yield not only better scholarship but firmer grounds for democratic hope.
This is the first book to explore the causes of the decline of British manufacturing in the 20th century by focusing on the troubled relationship between banks and small firms in a comparative ...historical perspective. Since the mid-1970s, the 'rediscovery' of small firms and of the important role they have played in the economies of continental Europe have occupied a substantial part of the literature on the sources of economic competitiveness. In Britain, the relationship between banks and industry has been the object of intense speculation since before the First World War. Since then banks have been accused by the business community, academics and politicians of neglecting industrial finance and by doing so of reducing the competitiveness of British firms. By comparing the rise of small firms in France, Germany and Italy and their decline in Britain this book analyses how the structure of these countries' banking systems has affected small firms' growth. This analysis is placed in the historical context of the political economy of these four countries, to show how banking and industrial structures developed over the century as a consequence of the state's need to mediate between different social and economic groups. This approach allows the author to show why British banking came to be so concentrated and the negative impact that this had on the supply of finance to small firms. The experiences of France, Germany and Italy show alternative structures and policy responses towards small firms. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/economicsfinance/0199257396/toc.html
The ongoing socio-economic situation in Ukraine is being scrutinized in real-time, providing a distinctive opportunity in this volume to analyze its impact on entrepreneurs' behavior during their ...efforts to stabilize businesses and the predominant challenges that most MSEs confront.
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