Bücher von Marc Grunhagen

Foreword One of the most frequently debated questions in management relates to what the r- sons for success and failure of new companies, corporate initiatives and projects are. Obviously, to increase the rate of young enterprises¿ success while reducing the n- ber of their failures would be a win-win situation for everyone. It is therefore vital to possess a ¿road map¿ or set of good advice on this never-easy undertaking. This book responds to such a need by presenting, in an accessible way, an overall view of the fundamental, critical areas of management of both the start-up and the continuity of new enterprises. Primarily, this book is addressed to students and teachers of the growing academic field of entrepreneurship studies. However, in my opinion, it also has an appeal to students and academics in any scholarly field, for in our times we can well speak about an organic interdependence between ¿entrepreneurship¿ and ¿higher education and research¿. A number of reasons exist for this double-helix arrangement. On the one hand, it can be pointed out that the role and conditions of present-day higher education call for much more open and innovative ways with which to approach core tasks such as teaching, the organization of studies and the undertaking of research, not to mention the whole area of funding.

Recent entrepreneurship research discusses numerous potential obstacles on the path towards business formation. The acquisition of resources, especially external finance, constitutesaformidablechallengefoundershavetomeet.Substantialrejectionratesof potential investors create external selection pressures on new ventures in that they contributetofailuresorinfluencethegrowthofsurvivingyoungcompanies.However, the founders themselves take an active role in the search for financial resources by addressing various potential financiers and taking decisions on the direction and continuation of their search for investors. Similarly, the results of the large US Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics point at the importance of adjustments in founders¿ fund-raising intentions in the course of early stage financial development of new ventures. The work at hand focuses on this process of solving problems during the search for external funding in emerging new ventures. The author explicitly does not analyze which factors of success will allow to convince potential investors with certainty. Regarding the search for funding as an open-ended process for epistemological reasons,heratheraimsatthereconstructionofsearchprocessesandthederivationof explanatorypatternsfortheactionsofventurefoundersinsearchofexternalfunding.