Adding more ethnography into the research mix.
This conference seeks to bring together anthropologists, sociologists, and entrepreneurship researchers with funding agencies to discuss how best to stimulate and support new research to collect and analyze detailed observations and information on how start-up teams react to and implement new firms in real time. It has become clear that business creation is a major factor in job growth, improved sector productivity, the creation of innovative and adaptive economic structures, and a major career option for tens of millions in the U.S. and other economies. As the significance of firm creation was discovered, a number of projects have focused on developing representative samples of individuals and teams involved in business creation. This has led to a number of robust empirically based relationships regarding entry into and activities involved in the business creation process. While these empirical regularities provide some predictive potential about the processes that lead to new firms, full understanding of the processes is incomplete. There is a lack of detailed information on how start-up teams react to and implement new firms in real time. This reflects the limits of information that can be developed from structured interviews and administrative databases. Understanding the dynamics as teams assemble information and respond to new opportunities as they work to implement new firms requires different data collection and research strategies. Trained, focused ethnographers, recording activities from on site observations, can do much to fill these gaps.
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