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This study aims to analyze how startups organize their purchasing activities to improve operative excellence and become attractive customers.

The authors use a two-phase exploratory approach with semistructured interviews and a World Café. In total, 20 startup purchasers and suppliers participated. It is an international study with participants from eight countries (Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Hungary, The Netherlands, the UK and the USA).

The authors find that startups organize the purchasing function in five ways: partial outsourcing, transactional-oriented, strategic only, outsourced purchasing and full department. Each type has advantages and disadvantages regarding operative excellence. The authors identify type-specific antecedents to operative excellence: forecasting, payment habits, ordering process, contact accessibility and quick decision-making.

The value of this paper is that it offers entrepreneurs a framework to organize startup purchasing activities, including outsourcing options. Furthermore, it provides theoretical contributions that expand the topic of purchasing and supply organization and operative excellence to the startup context.

The value of this paper is that, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first to explore purchasing organization and operative excellence in startups.

To analyze the performance implications of essential elements of strategic planning (time span, formalization, frequency of control, and use of planning instruments) in smaller enterprises in a simultaneous way.

The main methods being used for this article were a thorough review of literature for the development of hypotheses and a logistical regression analysis for the empirical evaluation. The study is based on a representative sample of small Austrian enterprises (n = 290).

Planning formalization has a positive and highly significant impact on the probability of belonging to the group of growth firms, whereas other aspects of strategic planning (time horizon, strategic instruments, and control) did not contribute to performance.

Employee growth has been used as an indicator for firm performance. Other indicators (e.g. sales growth, profitability, and subjective evaluation of the entrepreneur) might be used to draw a more detailed picture. Additionally, dichotomizing the dependent variable has some weaknesses. Furthermore, only a limited number of industry categories have been controlled for.

Practitioners might want to emphasize formal strategic planning in order to enhance the probability of performance. Also, they might want to regard the business plan as a management and learning tool rather than as a pure means to generate funding.

This paper is the first to analyze different dimensions of strategic planning in small firms simultaneously. Additionally, it is one of only very few studies outside of the Anglo‐American realm, which might be a help especially for European SMEs (small and medium‐sized enterprises).

The purpose of this paper is to provide a structured overview of the application of the configuration approach in the context of new and small ventures.

The paper surveys the empirical literature in the leading entrepreneurship journals from 1994 to 2006.

There are a small, but significant number of studies that deal with the empirical identification and examination of new venture types. However, researchers are just beginning to tap the potential of the configuration approach. More specifically, configuration analyses are still rather heterogeneous, and no study deals with the identification of development configuration in the context of new ventures yet.

Since the configuration approach has already delivered interesting results in research on new ventures, we might see additional studies based on this approach in the future. However, there are practical and theoretical considerations to be taken into account.

An awareness of the existence of different types of start‐ups can lead to more informed decisions in new venture management.

This literature review identifies and structures empirical configuration research in the context of new and small ventures. Also, awareness for future research opportunities is raised.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how age and job identification affect entrepreneurial intention.

The researchers draw on a representative sample of the Austrian adult workforce and apply binary logistic regression on entrepreneurial intention.

The findings reveal that as employees age they are less inclined to act entrepreneurially, and that their entrepreneurial intention is lower the more they identify with their job. Whereas gender, education, and previous entrepreneurial experience matter, leadership and having entrepreneurial parents seem to have no impact on the entrepreneurial intention of employees.

Implications relate to a contingency perspective on entrepreneurial intention where the impact of age is exacerbated by stronger identification with the job.

Practical implications include the need to account for different motivational backgrounds when addressing entrepreneurial employees of different ages. Societal implications include the need to adopt an age perspective to foster entrepreneurial intentions within established organizations.

While the study corroborates and extends findings from entrepreneurial intention research, it contributes new empirical insights to the age and job-dependent contingency perspective on entrepreneurial intention.

Twenty first century problems are increasingly being addressed by multi technology solutions developed by regional entrepreneurial and intreprepreneurial innovators. However, they require an expensive new type of fabrication facility. Multiple technology production facilities (MTPF) have become the essential incubators for these innovations. This paper aims to focus on the issues.

The authors address the lack of managerial understanding of how to express the value and operationally manage MTPF centers through the use of investigative case study methods for multiple firms in the study.

Owing to the MTPF centers' novelty and outward similarity to high volume semiconductor fabrication (HVF) facilities, they are laden with ineffective operation and strategic management practices. Metrics are the standard for both operational and strategic management of HVF facilities, yet their application to this new type of center is proving ineffectual.

These new types of regional economic resources may be at risk. A new approach is needed.

The authors develop an operational and strategic metrics management approach for MTPFs that are based on these facilities' unique nature and leverages both the HVF and R&D metrics knowledge base.

Innovations at the interface of micro technology, nanotechnology and semiconductor micro fabrication are poised to solve many of these problems and become a basis for job creation and prosperity. If a new management technique is not developed, then these harbingers of regional economic development will be closed.

While there is an abundance of research on metrics for HVF, this is the first attempt to develop metrics for MTPFs.

Business incubators (BI) have been established worldwide as tools for company creation and small businesses support. BIs claim to help their tenants by providing them with the optimal conditions for increasing early stage survival and long-term performance. Practitioners and researchers agree that business support is a crucial feature of incubating businesses. Yet this is seldom researched. In this study we theoretically relate business support to help in solving problems and further investigate to what extent business incubators support their tenants overcome their developmental problems. Results show that tenants do not experience many problems and when they do business support is not necessarily sought. Furthermore, our data suggests that business support is not preferentially sought within incubator environments. When this happens, support provided by the BI does not contribute to problem solving. Finally, we discuss the impact of the type of BI on helping their tenants.

Aims to describe a variety of journal‐writing processes and how they have been used with students in a graduate course in human resource development; describes possible causes of learning and writing blocks and how they can be overcome; evaluates the creative journal process by describing advantages, disadvantages and issues from both the students′ and the lecturers′ perspectives; and offers suggestions for people who use the journal process.