Entrepreneurialism and Society: An Introduction

The papers in these volumes originate from a growing project that began with a very personal story. Having founded a successful venture capital financed company in Japan, I entered academic work to find it rife with studies of entrepreneurship – few of which reflected my actual experience. With some exceptions including the work of my new colleagues at Stanford Technology Ventures Program, many studies and even more media articles focused on a few successful firms in Silicon Valley which were often well-established and hardly “start-ups.” In doing so, these writings typically minimized the arduous nature of entrepreneurship. Given the breadth and depth of scholarly work on the phenomenon of entrepreneurship, it was evident that there was solid research on motivations, resource flows, organizational processes, and the triumph or demise of ventures. Yet broadly, “entrepreneurship” was gaining purchase far beyond the simple organizational dynamics of organizing for profit.