A 227 The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Programs were established by Congress in 1992 to stimulate technological innovation in the private sector, strengthen the role of small businesses in meeting federal research and development needs, increase private-sector commercialization of innovations, and encourage participation by socially and...

according to the importance of entrepreneurship, as an engine of economic growth, recognizing the factors that influence business performance is of paramount important. since entrepreneurship is a cognitive process and fear affects it, the present study explores the effect of entrepreneur s’ perceived fear on their personal and business performance. the research is applied in intend and employs...

Although discrete event simulation has made significant progress in the health care field, it has been tested primarily in hospitals and specialty clinics. Our mission was to assess the effectiveness and economics of simulation in free standing ambulatory health care settings. Our findings to date indicate a good fit of simulation tools for the objective of total business process improvement. I...

In most countries, micro-enterprises make up the majority of firms. Canada has more than 500,000 employer micro-enterprises, representing 77% of all firms (Industry Canada, 2001); if we include owner-operated firms with no employees, the number and proportion of microenterprises would be much larger. Although the development potential of this group of firms would seem to be huge, micro-enterpri...

eCommerce can provide competitive advantage both by enhancing efficiency and helping an enterprise differentiate itself in the market. These forms of advantage apply differently according to industry sector and the size of the enterprise. This paper reports a study of one such industry sector, that of small, owner-operated restaurants within the larger hospitality industry. Drawing on two theor...

Opportunity Recognition (OR) was studied in highly profitable platform and radical or discontinuous products developed in large billion dollar companies. Platform projects, which provides a whole new offering to the company and did not require high risk technologies, required a trigger event to get started, had a long gestation period and required senior management sponsorship. In contrast OR i...

Executive Summary The glass ceiling phenomenon that impedes the advancement of talented women professionals into senior executive roles inside large corporations is widely recognized in society, studied in the management literature, taught in business schools, and tangibly felt by many women executives. Outside the corporate setting, we show that a second glass ceiling exists for women entrepre...

This paper discusses the findings of a study that investigated how the learning of innovative practices might best proceed in small businesses. The implementation of the Goods and Service Tax (GST) in Australia presented an opportunity for understanding how small business operatives learnt to implement a new practice. The research procedures comprised semi-structured interviews with thirty smal...

The package of increases in defined-contribution pension plan contribution limits that Congress enacted in 2001 could have benefited at most 8 percent of plan participants and 3 percent of all workers. High earners were potentially more likely to benefit than low earners, and potential beneficiaries generally had higher earnings than other participants. The increase in the percentage limit on c...

This paper focuses on assistance that externally-resident daughters provide for their aging parents in rural Tibet, China, to challenge the notion that rapid modernization invariably threatens family-based care systems for the elderly. The authors discuss social and economic changes associated with modernization that have created new opportunities for parents to send daughters out of their nata...