Small Business Trends

January is always pretty slow in business research land and this month has been no exception. So, I’m a few days late getting this report to you but that’s a good thing because I managed to wait long enough for the release of the 2011 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). This is their 13th annual survey and the news Read More

Several commentators have recently highlighted the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s finding that the share of U.S adults starting or running a new business increased by 60 percent from 2010 to 2011. While I understand the desire to focus on the positive after so many years of declining entrepreneurial activity in the United States, I’m not sure the GEM results really signal Read More

Ernest Hemingway apparently got the answer wrong when F. Scott Fitzgerald told him “the rich are different from you and me” and Hemingway responded “Yes, they’ve got more money.”

His answer should have been: “They own businesses.”

The chart at the bottom of the page shows the probability that a taxpayer includes a partnership or S-Corp on his or her Read More

How do you define success? A new study from The Hartford set out to discover what constitutes success in the eyes of small business owners. Here’s what the Small Business Success Study of 2,000 small business owners found:

Overall, business owners are feeling good. One in five (22.9 percent) say their businesses are very or Read More

Having an uncertain income is one of the things that people find frightening about going into business for themselves. Unlike a salary earned from working for someone else, future business profits are hard to predict. And people like to be able to forecast what they will earn in coming years.

While the the unpredictability of business income is something that Read More

Everybody loves lists — or at least, everybody who reads blogs, so we are told. I don’t do lists very often because it never seems that the information I write about fits well into the format.  This month’s Research Roundup post breaks the mold.

Lists take up a lot of space, though, so I’m only going Read More

Here’s a fact that should worry those people who are relying on entrepreneurs to solve this country’s unemployment problems.

Recently released Census Bureau data shows that start-ups account for a shrinking share of U.S. job creation. A report analyzing the Census Bureau’s business dynamics data shows that the start-up job creation rate declined precipitously during the Great Recession, Read More

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) recently conducted focus groups to learn what entrepreneurs, investors and others believe we need to do to enhance entrepreneurship in America. One of their findings was that we need to improve entrepreneurship education in our K-12 schools.

While it’s hard to argue with “improving education” for anything, this Read More

Universities and federal laboratories often license their inventions to industry as a way to commercialize those technical advances. Which generate higher royalties?

Recently released data from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) indicates that the average university invention brought in significantly more in licensing income than Read More

How do women-owned businesses differ from companies owned by men? Not as much as they used to, according to a recent study from the SBA’s Office of Advocacy. “Business ownership no longer can be analyzed simply on the basis of the owner’s gender; businesses owned by women and men more and more share the same general development patterns,” write the Read More