Relating practice to theory in indigenous entrepreneurship : a pilot investigation of the Kitsaki partnership portfolio

In Canada and elsewhere around the world, Indigenous Peoples are struggling to rebuild their "nations" and improve the socioeconomic circumstances of their people. Many see economic development as the key to success. This is certainly true for Indigenous people in Canada (the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit, collectively called Aboriginal or Indigenous people). Among them, participation in the global economy through entrepreneurship and business development is widely accepted as the key to economy building and nation "re-building." As elaborated in the next section, the demand is that this participation must be on their own terms for their own purposes, and traditional lands, history, culture, and values play a critical role. There is an intriguing symmetry between the modernity of the desire for global business competence and competitiveness and the insistence upon the distinctive importance of cultural heritage in developing new enterprise. The way that the two superficially contrasting concepts of innovation and heritage are combined in the field of Indigenous entrepreneurship has been expounded by Hindle and Lansdowne.1

Recognizing the challenges they face in attempting to compete in the global economy on their own terms, Indigenous people are increasingly developing enterprises in the form of partnerships of all types among themselves and with non-Indigenous enterprises. As both a form and a context of business organization, the partnership or alliance model is particularly fraught with the need to blend the old with the new, heritage with innovation. This study is a preliminary investigation of the Kitsaki initiative of the Lac La Ronge Indian band. In it we:

* explore several ventures involved in the partnership, asking key operatives for their opinions about the factors that explain success and failure;

* distill the explanations into as few, all-embracing factors as possible;

* relate the findings to the emerging theory of Indigenous entrepreneurship, with particular reference to the suggested paradigm of Indigenous entrepreneurship developed by Hindle and Lansdowne (2002);

* project the results of the investigation into suggestions for a more structured program of future research.

From what we know to how we use it : five principles for turning entrepreneurship research and practitioner action guidelines

This and the companion paper that follows owe their existence to a paper presented by Kevin Hindle at the AGSE Regional Entrepreneurship and Innovation Research Exchange in February 2004. In his paper, Hindle (2004) argued passionately that entrepreneurship researchers must ensure that the best of their hardwon wisdom does not find its beginning motivation and final resting place in the pages of arcane journals that practitioners never read. He suggested that if every entrepreneurship researcher committed, say once every two years, to write a "how to" article it would significantly enhance the status of the research community in the eyes of practising entrepreneurs and those who provide support and services to them.

The argument was well-received, particularly by two people in the audience, Robert Anderson, the managing editor of the Journal of Small Business and Entrepreneurship, the journal of the Canadian Council for Small Business and Entrepreneurship/Conseil Canadien des PME et de l'entrepreneuriat (CCSBE/ CCPME), and Brian Gibson, the editor of Small Enterprise Research, the journal of the Small Enterprise Association of Australia and New Zealand (SEAANZ). For both editors, Hindle's argument was a familiar one. The membership of CCSBE/CCPME and SEAANZ consists of academic researchers, educators, government employees in both policy and program areas, and those offering support and services to entrepreneurs and the managers of small enterprises. In both organizations, there is a general consensus that the needs of "academics" are well met, but not so the needs of the non-academic constituents.

Brave spirits on new paths : toward a globally relevant paradigm of Indigenous entrepreneurship research

This is the first study in a series aimed at strengthening research in the emerging field of Indigenous entrepreneurship. A literature survey revealed two dominant themes: the need to reconcile tradition with innovation and the need to understand how Indigenous world-views and values impact upon enterprise. Four relevant theoretical contexts guided an empirical investigation employing depth interviews with 40 selected opinion leaders representing two cultures: Indigenous Australian and American Indian. Data evaluation culminated in the formal articulation of a paradigm for Indigenous entrepreneurship research. Discussion focused on utility of the paradigm and future research directions.

Indigenous entrepreneurship as a research field : developing a definitional framework from the emerging canon

This study defines Indigenous entrepreneurship as a distinct disciplinary field of science and charts for it a pre-paradigmatic framework. A strategy of literature search and examination was utilized to argue that Indigenous entrepreneurship is sufficiently distinguished from both mainstream entrepreneurship and other social and management sciences to constitute a legitimate, well-defined sub-field of research in its own right. The study provides both a formal definition of the field and diagrammatic framework to describe it.

Public research commercialisation, entrepreneurship and new technology based firms : an integrated model

Entrepreneurship is the engine of innovation. The accumulated tacit knowledge and culture of the entrepreneur are the resources essential to create wealth from research commercialisation leading to technological innovation and the creation of New Technology Based Firms (NTBFs). The authors explore, in definitional terms, discovery of entrepreneurial opportunity and entrepreneurial capacity as the essential elements in the interaction between all types of tacit knowledge (technological, managerial, risk management, financial, etc.). These both derive from and affect interactions between the institutions (sets of rules), organisational culture and external business environment. They also interact with the entrepreneur’s own background and personality. This leads then to a wider analysis of the importance of such tacit knowledge as the glue bringing together effective mechanisms for wealth creation out of research commercialisation.

A measurement framework for international entrepreneurship policy research : from impossible index to malleable matrix

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a multifaceted, multinational research programme now in its seventh year of field operation, currently dominates the field of international entrepreneurship policy research but faces a crisis of credibility. Despite having created and continuing to develop a very rich database capable of addressing many of the complexities requisite for understanding entrepreneurship at the national and international levels of analysis, GEM has chosen to disguise the depths of its potential research and policy utility through a misnamed quest for unobtainable simplicity at the centre of the project and a disorganised variety of report presentations at the periphery. Subsequent to a review of the entrepreneurial definitional literature and a resolution of its many themes into six components of entrepreneurial activity, based on Penrose's (1959/1995) articulation of the practical meaning of 'entrepreneurial services', this paper suggests that a 'malleable matrix' approach can provide a practical measurement framework capable of reporting national entrepreneurial activity in a structure that is comprehensive without being overwhelming.

Exploring the relationship between media coverage and participation in entrepreneurship : initial global evidence and research implications

Using a set of variables measured in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) study, our empirical investigation explored the influence of mass media through national culture on national entrepreneurial participation rates in 37 countries over 4 years (2000 to 2003). We found that stories about successful entrepreneurs, conveyed in mass media, were not significantly associated with the rate of nascent (opportunity searching) or the rate of actual (business activities commenced up to 3 months old) start-up activity, but that there was a significant positive association between the volume of entrepreneurship media stories and a nation’s volume of people running a young business (that is in GEM terminology, a business aged greater than 3 but less than 42 months old). More particularly, such stories had strong positive association with opportunity oriented operators of young businesses. Together, these findings are compatible with what in the mass communications theory literature may be called the ‘reinforcement model’. This argues that mass media are only capable of reinforcing their audience’s existing values and choice propensities but are not capable of shaping or changing those values and choices. In the area covered by this paper, policy-makers are committing public resources to media campaigns of doubtful utility in the absence of an evidence base. A main implication drawn from this study is the need for further and more sophisticated investigation into the relationship between media coverage of entrepreneurship, national culture and the rates and nature of people’s participation in the various stages of the entrepreneurial process.

Influence of social network structure on entrepreneurship participation — a study of 20 national

By investigating differences in social networks among entrepreneurs in 20 cultures, this paper contributes to the debate on whether there is universality in the process of entrepreneurial networking. Representative samples of entrepreneurs were identified in the same manner in 20 countries from 2000 to 2004 (N=€‰304,560). The sampling methodologies and the questions asked were similar across all countries. Logistic regression was used to test for significant regional interaction effects involving personally knowing an entrepreneur. Results are contrary to the existence of any mono-dimensional form of networking practice but do strongly support the existence of both variform universality (culture moderates the importance of networking) and functional universality (cultural similarities in networking practice exist).

Communicating entrepreneurship and ethnicity in New Zealand

In this paper, we compare entrepreneurship practice of the Maori culture with that of the other five ethnic groups or cultures in New Zealand including European New Zealanders, Europeans, Chinese, Indians and Pacific Islanders. One of the most reported findings in previous GEM reports was that Maori are every bit as entrepreneurial as other ethnicities. Some commentators were surprised by this finding, since Maori collect more than their proportionate share of benefit entitlements. But we have shown that Maori have a history of entrepreneurship and enterprise upon which to draw (Frederick and Henry, 2004). The Maori economy, though small, is "robust and poised for continued expansion", says a recent report by the Institute of Economic Research (NZIER, 2003).

Understanding success in indigenous entrepreneurship : an exploratory investigation

In Canada there are numerous studies about indigenous Entrepreneurship, most descriptive with little theory development or testing, This leaves a gap in the information available to researchers, policy makers and practitioners. In this paper we describe a research program intended to address this gap beginning with the activities of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band, considered an exemplar of successful indigenous entrepreneurship. From these activities, we draw propositions about indigenous entrepreneurship that are compatible with generic theory. Finally, we describe how we will move from these propositions to a model of indigenous entrepreneurship using grounded theory and structural equation modelling.

Entrepreneurship and economic growth : why is New Zealand an outlier? A preliminary analysis

The literature indicates that entrepreneurship and economic growth are closely and positively associated. For four years running, New Zealand has had the developed world’s highest rate of “Total Entry-Level Entrepreneurial Activity” (Acs et al. 2005; Frederick et al. 2004; Reynolds et al., 2004), yet it has slid to the lower ranks in the OECD in measures of economic development. At its level of entrepreneurial activity, New Zealand should have a higher level of economic development if it were to emulate other countries.

We make use of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data set, including nascent entrepreneurship rates for 45 countries over the 2000-2004 period as well as variables from standardised national statistics.

The paper uses two approaches. This research first finds evidence for “U-shaped curve” associating entrepreneurship with economic growth. It notes that New Zealand has the greatest deviation from this association compared to other developed countries with similar entrepreneurial rates (e.g. United States, Australia and Iceland). The second approach looks at nascent entrepreneurship as a function of non-economic conditions such as technology, demography, culture and institutions.

This short paper develops the hypotheses and carries out the “U-shaped curve” test. For the time being it leaves the factor analysis of non-economic conditions for another opportunity.