3: National Research Joint Venture Database

As discussed in Chapter 1, NSF supported the development of the CORE database in 1993, and NSF continued its support of the database through 2007.¹ While I constructed and then maintained the CORE database at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and shared it with many other researchers and their graduate students, I slowly was able to develop a relationship – and the general term relationship does not have a unique meaning; it varied across RJVs – with individuals in the lead firm of each RJV. Some of those relationships lasted longer than others. I was patterning this one-on-one data collection effort on the many data collection suggestions from my longtime friend and frequent mentor, Edwin Mansfield.²