Introduction to Measuring Entrepreneurial Businesses: Current Knowledge and Challenges

The contribution of entrepreneurial businesses to economic growth is a frequently debated topic among the academic and policy-making communities and the subject of much discussion in the business and popular press. High growth entrepreneurial businesses have made a substantial impact on the US economy, but these are small in number relative to the hundreds of thousands of new start-ups in the US every year, many of which fail or don’t grow. Understanding the enormous heterogeneity across entrepreneurs is an ongoing area of active research. Our ability to accurately track how businesses perform in a complex economic and financial environment is hampered by difficult measurement challenges. This book presents research on the state of entrepreneurship and addresses the challenges we face in understanding this dynamic part of our economies.