Money and Ideas: Four Studies on Finance, Innovation and the Business Life Cycle

Money and Ideas: Four Studies on Finance, Innovation and the Business Life Cycle Summary:

Publisher: Springer | Pages: 107 | 2009-11-24 | ISBN 1441912274 | PDF | 1 MB

From the start, businesses experience a bewildering array of opportunities and hurdles. At every stage of a firm’s life cycle, the primary obstacle is access to capital. Drawing from a variety of fields and empirical research perspectives, this book presents four scientific studies that explore the implications of financial constraints during start-up and subsequent phases. The first study focuses on the financial challenges to the nascent entrepreneur – someone who is planning to, or has just started their business – and asks whether all innovative ideas get financed. Through a survey of 900 nascent entrepreneurs, this chapter demonstrates how the appropriability and feasibility of an innovation can be proven by using patents and prototypes in a signaling fashion. The second study demonstrates the strong motivation among scientists to pursue patents for non-financial reasons, such as professional prestige and reputation, and considers the strategic function in financial matters that patents play for the firm. The next chapter looks at the firm life cycle in the second stage of the business life cycle. As a small or medium-sized enterprise (SME), with employees and a more sophisticated supply and distribution network, the firm’s working capital requirements increase. This study focuses on the role played by local lending institutions, such as credit unions, especially as traditional banks avoid small businesses, and even more dramatically during periods of economics crisis. The concluding chapter explores the implications of start-up financing for economic growth and development. This study provocatively demonstrates that in countries that lack efficient financial, political, and legal institutions, corruption (often in the form of bribes) is a necessary condition for business development. Studying 2,500 African firms, the author argues that corruption negatively affects product and organizational innovation while it encourages the use of marketing innovation. Taken together, these studies offer new insights into the emergence of new businesses and the factors that influence their success. 

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