Abstracts - 2006 MERC Conference
Zoltan Acs, School of Public Policy
Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: 7th Annual U.S. GEM Report Takes First Look at America’s High-Potential Entrepreneurs
Abstract: U.S. entrepreneurs are in a league of their own when it comes to building innovative businesses that keep the economy dynamic and productive, according to the seventh annual U.S. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). More than in any other nation, U.S. entrepreneurs are motivated by opportunities in what GEM researchers call ‘high-potential entrepreneurship’ -- fast growing, new ventures involved in the latest technologies and knowledge-transfer businesses. Nine out of ten U.S. entrepreneurs are “opportunity entrepreneurs”; only one in ten U.S. entrepreneurs start a new business out of necessity, where there are no better choices for work. U.S. early-stage entrepreneurship continues to be robust; it maintained greater stability than other G7 nations (Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, Japan) following the economic downturn in 2000. U.S. entrepreneurs are very good at building high levels of ‘dynamism’ -- the ratio of early-stage entrepreneurship to established business ownership. Thus, the U.S. has more early-stage and high-expectation entrepreneurship, greater investment rates, and an overall healthier economy than other countries. Expectations of new job creation from startups and established businesses hit record levels in 2005. There are significantly higher numbers of start-ups and new business owners providing jobs compared to 2003 and 2004. This positive trend indicates a favorable change in the U.S. business environment towards more and larger, new businesses.
Matthew Cronin, School of Management
A strategy for improving insight at work
Abstract: This study is about helping people to have more insights, which should in turn make them more creative and innovative. Insight is the “Aha!” sensation that occurs when without foreseeable warning when a person discovers a new conceptualization of the problem (i.e., problem representation), resulting in a new and better approach to solving it (Nonaka, 1994; Ohlsson, 1992). Insight is critical because it can lead to successful product innovation (Cagan & Vogel, 2002; Dougherty, 1992), scientific discoveries (Cagan, Kotovsky, & Simon, 2002; Dunbar, 1995), competitive advantage (DeVanna & Tichy, 1990), and efficiency boosts (c.f. Argote, 1999, Ch. 1); all of which are widely recognized as important (Amabile, 1988; Perry-Smith & Shalley, 2003; Woodman, Sawyer, & Griffin, 1993). By understanding how insight occurs, we can understand how to make people and ultimately groups more creative and innovative. Unfortunately, practical guidance for making people more insightful is scarce. Most research on insight tends to focus on identification of the phenomena and offers no predictions about insight other than the sequence for how it will occur (impasse – incubation – illumination, see Davidson, 1995; Metcalfe & Weibe, 1987; Mayer, 1995; Smith, 1995). It does not describe the relationship between the length of impasse and the probability of an insight, whether the length of impasse can be shortened, or even whether an impasse is necessary for an insight. Moreover, the research on insight does not examine insight as it occurs in the larger context of “standard” problem solving (Hayes & Simon, 1974). Lab work on insight uses problems where the only activity is finding the insight (Weisberg, 1995), and field or archival studies on scientific discovery focus on the insight to the exclusion of the other problem solving processes that led up to it (e.g. Gruber, 1995; but for an exception see Cagan, Kotovsky, & Simon, 2002). One of the few, if any, studies that provides guidance on how to make people more insightful as they solve problems is Cronin (2004), which suggested that the more one is engaged in problem solving activity that uses working memory, the longer it will take to have an insight. Cronin’s (2004) model was a computer simulation, so there has been no test on people of whether the model’s basic principle, that conscious activity interferes with unconscious activity, holds. This study seeks to validate this model and expand it to include content effects that may affect insight.
Matthew Kluger, Vice President for Research & Economic Development
Entrepreneurship at Mason: The view from 20,000 feet
Abstract: George Mason University touts itself as a highly entrepreneurial university. It has the Mason Enterprise Center (MEC), which provides a wide array of services to assist companies (both inside and outside of Mason). The School of Management has a wide variety of entrepreneurial programs, as does the School of Public Policy. Courses in entrepreneurship are taught across our campus, including the “Geeks to Gazillionaires” course in the Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering and the School of Management. The students at Mason have an Inventors Club, and there are a host of other activities occurring on our campus.
Linda Samuels, Mahesh Joshi, and M. Yvonne Demory, School of Management
Small business failure due to discrimination
Abstract: Statistics reveal that many entrepreneurial firms fail within the first six years of their founding. While there is a tremendous focus in the entrepreneurship literature on why and how entrepreneurial ventures begin, there is little literature on firm failure. This paper focuses on this important, yet unexplored topic, learning from a failed firm. It specifically focuses on learning from the experience of managing bankruptcy due to racial discrimination. We use the recent decision rendered by the Supreme Court concerning Domino’s Pizza, Inc., et al. v. McDonald. In this decision, the Supreme Court pointed out that Mr. McDonald had waived (through the actions of its bankruptcy trustee) any potential claims of racial discrimination at personal level against Domino’s Pizza when his small construction firm settled with Domino’s Pizza concerning the racial discrimination lawsuit as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. We assert that the implications of this case are significant because while the number of minority owned U.S. businesses have grown, their national failure rate has been consistently higher than averages for all new US business. The issue of discrimination can be vital for minority firms and also for majority firms with minority employees. Accordingly, we argue that if a firm fails due to discrimination, resulting legal claims can be valuable assets for minority owned business. Through the discussion and analysis of the Domino’s Pizza case, this article shows that issues relating to equal employment, inter-company contracting and choice of business organization must be managed by the entrepreneur throughout the company’s life to yield a better exit stage result. Moreover, the case has lessons for the ongoing entrepreneurial firm as they seek to maximize their return on assets.
Larry Kerschberg, Daniel Menasce, and Hanjo Jeong, E-Center for E-Business
Knowledge Sifter: Agent-based search over heterogenous sources using semantic
Knowledge Sifter is a scaleable agent-based system that supports access to heterogeneous information resources such as the Web, open-source repositories, XML-databases and the emerging Semantic Web. The architecture has three layers: User Layer, Knowledge Management Layer, and Data Layer. The User Agent interacts with the user to elicit user preferences that are managed by the Preferences Agent. These preferences include the relative importance attributed to terms used to pose queries, the perceived authoritativeness of Web search engine results, and other preferences to be used by the Integration Agent. The user indicates an initial query to the Query Formulation Agent. This agent, in turn, consults the Ontology Agent to refine or generalize the query based on the semantic mediation provided by the ontology services available. The Ontology Agent uses a conceptual model for the domain by means of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) schema specification of the Imagery Domain Model (based on ISO 19115 and 19139). The Knowledge Sifter architecture is general and modular so that new ontologies and new information resources can be easily incorporated. The Web Services Agent uses domain knowledge regarding the data sources, such as QoS attributes, source authoritativeness, and image sizes, to optimize the execution of subqueries. The Ranking Agent is responsible for compiling the sub-query results from the various sources, ranking them according to user preferences supplied by the Preferences Agent. Knowledge Sifter project is sponsored by a NURI from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) through their Innovision Program.
Drs. Kerschberg and Menascé are Co-PIs on this project. Mr. Hanjo Jeong is the Chief Programmer for Knowledge Sifter. For more information about Knowledge Sifter, please visit the E-Center for E-Business Publications Page.
Emilia Istrate and Kadri Kallas, School of Public Policy
A Spatial Analysis of Businesses that Employ Virginia Small Business Development Center Services
Abstract: This paper undertakes a spatial analysis of enterprises that use the services of Virginia Small Business Development Centers (SBDC). Virginia SBDC network has 29 local centers that provide professional business counseling on business planning, marketing, financial analysis, and business start-up, to name some. Start-ups and small businesses are commonly used as a measure of the strength of entrepreneurial basis in a regional economy. This paper uses a nonrandom sample of enterprises in Fairfax City, Fairfax County and Arlington County that employ the services of the three business development centers in these counties. The paper tests two hypotheses: is the location of enterprises clustered around universities and business development centers, and is there a spatial autocorrelation between the enterprises that have employed SBDC services. Analyzing these questions allows us to draw conclusions about the knowledge-orientation of the enterprises and about possible channels how the information about the availability of SBDC services diffuses.
Juan Julio Gutierrez, School of Public Policy
Innovation in manufacturing: The role of internal and external networks
Abstracts: This paper explores the determinants of three innovation outputs. Two of them were laid out in Schumpeter’s typology (1934): a) new products, and b) new production processes. The third one, c) improvements in existing products, is drawn from Kline and Rosenberg’s (1986) insight that innovation implies not only the creation of completely new products or processes but relatively small changes in product performance which may (over a long period) have major technological and economic implications. The modeling of innovation drivers gets its theoretical background from two strands of the literature. First, innovation is dependent on the factory’s network of relationships, both internal and external. The internal network is equated to intra-firm cooperation; while external network is divided between inter firm and institutional networking (Zanfei, 2000). Second, the model follows Kline and Rosenberg (1996) insights about innovation inputs, considering adaptation and development within the plant but also including inputs such as acquisition of machinery and equipment and increasing the quality of human capital. The model is applied to a cross country plant-level database, the World Bank’s “Investment Climate Survey” (ICS). The ICS collected information of manufacturing industries, which can be categorized as low tech sectors. The statistical testing results support the idea that external networks, mainly interaction with universities, constitute a consistent mechanism to generate innovation outputs in low tech sectors. On the input side, the results highlight: 1) the importance of machinery and equipment acquisition because new technology is embodied in those capital goods, and 2) the relevance of adaptation and development within the factory for low tech manufacturing industries where learning by doing is an integral component to gain incremental innovation.
Donglian Sun, Menas Kafatos, Guido Cervone, Zafer Boybeyi, and Ruixin Yang
Satellite Microwave Detected SST Anomalies and Hurricane Intensification / Center for Earth Observing and Space Research
SST from the remotely sensed infrared measurements, like the GOES, AVHRR, and MODIS, etc., show missing values of sea surface temperature (SST) over the cloudy regions associated with hurricanes. While satellite microwave measurements, like the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) microwave imager (TMI), can provide SST even under cloudy conditions. Both of satellite microwave measurements and buoy observations show SST increase in advance of significant hurricane intensification. Moreover, hurricane intensification may also be related to the location of high SST. Our results indicate pre-exist high SST anomaly (SSTA) located at the right side of the storm track for Hurricane Katrina. Numerical simulations also confirm the important impacts of SSTA location on hurricane intensification. Similar situations are also found for Hurricanes Rita and Wilma. In contrast, if there is no high SSTA at the right location, hurricane may not undergo further intensification. This may explain why not all tropical cyclones associated with warm waters can attain peak intensity (categories 4 and 5) during their life cycle, and partially explain why usually hurricane may not be able to reach the maximum potential intensity as calculated only according to the magnitude of SST.