Ventana software support forum

Posted by ""Finn Jackson"" <finn.jackson@tangley.com>
Greetings all,

Does anybody know of SD work done in the area of ""rates of entrepreneurship""
within an economy? In other words, the key factors affecting the percentage
of a population thinking about starting or actually starting their own
businesses, and the dynamic interactions between those factors.


Many thanks,
Finn Jackson
Posted by ""Finn Jackson"" <finn.jackson@tangley.com>
posting date Fri, 15 Jul 2005 22:12:25 +0100

Posted by DavidPKreutzer@aol.com
Finn,

I remember a presentation in one of the international conferences around 1980
to 83 where the author reported a study of business formation in the
Pittsberg PA area. The authors concluded that the key leverage point for encouraging
entreprenuershiop was in reducing the failure rate not increasing the
formation rate. The business creation rate was sufficiently high and continuous but
many firms that were actually profitable or becoming profitable were destroyed
by detrimental cash flow spikes. They reccomended that the most helpful and
effective intervention the regional and state business promoters could provide
would be different loan standards based on a deeper understanding of the
longer term business dynamics rather than the standard spreadsheets.

Also, a couple years of research on Forrester's National Modeling project
replicating the dynamcis reported by Gerhart Mensch on very long term studies of
the German or European economies finding continious rates of invention but a
long wave of innovation. John Sterman and Alan Graham both wrote interesting
papers on this. We did a small project trying to infer an aggregate long-term
technological growth rate multiplier for the Hick's Neutral adaptation of the
Cobb-Douglas production function. It came to about 1.8 percent for the US
from 1800s to 1970. But I don't think this was ever written up.

Good Luck,

David Kreutzer
Posted by DavidPKreutzer@aol.com
posting date Mon, 18 Jul 2005 14:22:58 EDT