The SAGE Handbook of Small Business and Entrepreneurship offers state-of-the-art chapters on all aspects of this rapidly-evolving discipline. Original contributions from the best international scholars map the development of Entrepreneurship as an academic field, explore its key current debates and research methods, and also consider its future directions. Part One: The People and the Entrepreneurial Processes Part Two: Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management and Organization Part Three: Entrepreneurial Milieu Part Four: Researching Small Business Entrepreneurship This handbook will be the leading reference book for Entrepreneurship academics and researchers, as well as those from other associated disciplines including business and management, psychology, marketing, sociology and anthropology.
This book covers the practical aspects of database design, data cleansing, data analysis, and data protection, among others. The focus is on what you really need to know to create the right database for your small business and to leverage it most effectively to spur growth and revenue. Databases for Small Business is a practical handbook for entrepreneurs, managers, staff, and professionals in small organizations who are not IT specialists but who recognize the need to ramp up their small organizations’ use of data and to round out their own business expertise and office skills with basic database proficiency. Anna Manning—a data scientist who has worked on database design and data analysis in a computer science university research lab, her own small business, and a nonprofit—walks you through the progression of steps that will enable you to extract actionable intelligence and maximum value from your business data in terms of marketing, sales, customer relations, decision making, and business strategy. Dr. Manning illustrates the steps in the book with four running case studies of a small online business, an engineering startup, a small legal firm, and a nonprofit organization. Databases for Small Business teaches non-techie entrepreneurs and professionals how to: Design a small business database from scratch Extract the maximum profit from your data Follow guidance on data protection law Effectively use data collection and data cleansing techniques Train staff to leverage your data
Ecotourism is an effective way for businesses in a tourism destination to have a positive impact on their host community. Whether the business in question is an experience provider, a lodging facility, a product-based company, or anything in between, this handbook provides the proper guidelines for sustainable and responsible business practices that promote the preservation of natural resources and wildlife and contribute to the socio-cultural and economic growth of the local community. This handbook is intended to be used by small and medium businesses, including those under development, entrepreneurs, and organizations in the tourism industry as a resource and a guide to adopt specific actions to become more sustainable and successful.
In the modern globalized economy, it is important for businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the opportunity to enter diverse markets around the world. Through an international presence, organizations can remain competitive. The Handbook of Research on Global Business Opportunities combines comprehensive viewpoints and research on various business enterprises from around the world in companies of all sizes and models, discussing different aspects and concerns in the global business environment such as corruption, taxation, supply chain management, and economic impacts. This handbook is an essential reference source for business executives from both large and small firms, business scholars, researchers, academics, students, and professionals.
Handbook of Statistical Analysis and Data Mining Applications, Second Edition, is a comprehensive professional reference book that guides business analysts, scientists, engineers and researchers, both academic and industrial, through all stages of data analysis, model building and implementation. The handbook helps users discern technical and business problems, understand the strengths and weaknesses of modern data mining algorithms and employ the right statistical methods for practical application. This book is an ideal reference for users who want to address massive and complex datasets with novel statistical approaches and be able to objectively evaluate analyses and solutions. It has clear, intuitive explanations of the principles and tools for solving problems using modern analytic techniques and discusses their application to real problems in ways accessible and beneficial to practitioners across several areas—from science and engineering, to medicine, academia and commerce. - Includes input by practitioners for practitioners - Includes tutorials in numerous fields of study that provide step-by-step instruction on how to use supplied tools to build models - Contains practical advice from successful real-world implementations - Brings together, in a single resource, all the information a beginner needs to understand the tools and issues in data mining to build successful data mining solutions - Features clear, intuitive explanations of novel analytical tools and techniques, and their practical applications
"This important Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics reports on the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), the most comprehensive scientifically representative study to date of nascent entrepreneurs. The book is unique because the study identified individuals in the process of creating new businesses to understand how, at its very source, people move from considering the option of starting a new business to its actual founding. This has never been done before in the history of entrepreneurship research... I cannot recommend this book more strongly to entrepreneurship scholars and those interested in where entrepreneurs come from and how they move from their initial idea to new venture founding." --Claudia Bird Schoonhoven, University of California, Irvine "This Handbook makes a terrific contribution to understanding entrepreneurship and new business creation. Its 38 chapters report major findings from the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED), an unprecedented research program involving more than a hundred researchers from 10 countries. This Handbook is ′must reading′ for anyone interested in entrepreneurship research." --Andrew H. Van de Ven, Carlson School of Management, University of Minnesota Entrepreneurial activity provides profound positive benefits across an important set of measures of social and economic well-being, much of it concentrated in new economic sectors such as information technology. Yet, even though entrepreneurship has been shown to provide many benefits, it is surprising that there has not been a systematic study of the entrepreneurial process. The Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics: The Process of Business Creation fills this gap by offering theories, ideas, and measures that can be used to explore and understand the factors that encompass and influence the creation of new businesses. The chapters in the handbook provide the rationale for questionnaires used in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED). The PSED is a research program that was initiated to provide systematic, reliable, and generalizable data on important features of the new business creation process. The PSED includes information on the proportion and characteristics of the adult population involved in efforts to start businesses, the activities and characteristics that comprise the nature of the business start-up process, and the proportion and characteristics of those business start-up efforts that actually become new businesses. The handbook also describes the PSED data collection process; provides documentation of the interview schedules, codebooks, data preparation and weighting scheme; as well as offers examples of how analyses of PSED data might be conducted. The authors identify specific measures that can be used to operationalize theory as well as provide evidence from the PSED data sets on these measures′ reliability and validity. The Handbook of Entrepreneurial Dynamics is ideal for a sizeable audience, including graduate students, academics, and librarians in schools of business and management who need a comprehensive reference on business creation. In addition, researchers and policy makers at the federal, state, and local level will find this an invaluable reference covering all of the factors involved in new venture formation. Key Features: * Considers categories of data not available prior to the PSED * Includes a comprehensive overview of theories about new business formation * Provides demographics of nascent entrepreneurs * Analyzes the cognitive characteristics of nascent entrepreneurs * Explores all of the processes of new business formation
How do organizations manage social media effectively? Every organization wants to implement social media, but it is difficult to create processes and mange employees to make this happen. Most social media books focus on strategies for communicating with customers, but they fail to address the internal process that takes place within a business before those strategies can be implemented. This book is geared toward helping you manage every step of the process required to use social media for business. The Social Media Management Handbook provides a complete toolbox for defining and practicing a coherent social media strategy. It is a comprehensive resource for bringing together such disparate areas as IT, customer service, sales, communications, and more to meet social media goals. Wollan and Smith and their Accenture team explain policies, procedures, roles and responsibilities, metrics, strategies, incentives, and legal issues that may arise. You will learn how to: Empower employees and teams to utilize social media effectively throughout the organization Measure the ROI of social media investments and ensure appropriate business value is achieved over time Make smarter decisions, make them more quickly, and make them stick Get the most out of your social media investment and fully leverage its benefits at your company with The Social Media Management Handbook.
The SAGE Handbook of Family Business captures the conceptual map and state-of-the-art thinking on family business - an area experiencing rapid global growth in research and education since the last three decades. Edited by the leading figures in family business studies, with contributions and editorial board support from the most prominent scholars in the field, this Handbook reflects on the development and current status of family enterprise research in terms of applied theories, methods, topics investigated, and perspectives on the field′s future. The SAGE Handbook of Family Business is divided into following six sections, allowing for ease of navigation while gaining a multi-dimensional perspective and understanding of the field. Part I: Theoretical perspectives in family business studies Part II: Major issues in family business studies Part III: Entrepreneurial and managerial aspects in family business studies Part IV: Behavioral and organizational aspects in family business studies Part V: Methods in use in family business studies Part VI: The future of the field of family business studies By including critical reflections and presenting possible alternative perspectives and theories, this Handbook contributes to the framing of future research on family enterprises around the world. It is an invaluable resource for current and future scholars interested in understanding the unique dynamics of family enterprises under the rubric of entrepreneurship, strategic management, organization theory, accounting, marketing or other related areas.