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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between an individual's personal acquaintance with an entrepreneur and his/her participation in entrepreneurial activity at three distinct new venture stages: discovery (intending to start a business), start‐up (actively in the process of starting a business), and young (running a business for less than three months).

Using Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data from 35 countries (n=311,720) pooled across three years (2002‐2004) and multinomial logistic regression, the paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurial networking and entrepreneurial participation across gender. Gender differences in entrepreneurial networking are also examined.

The findings indicate that individuals who personally know an entrepreneur are more likely to participate in entrepreneurial activity at any venture stage but that female entrepreneurs, compared with their male counterparts, are less likely to be acquainted with an entrepreneur. Taken together, these findings suggest that one of the reasons why women are less likely to become entrepreneurs is that they lack entrepreneurial resource providers or role models in their social networks.

The paper is subject to two limitations. First, the paper includes a single item measure of social network composition. Second, although the paper includes data from 2000 to 2004, the dataset is cross‐sectional and is thus based on different cohorts of participants. The paper offers a number of implications for theory, practice, and future research. One of the most important implications is that female entrepreneurship participation could be enhanced by policy directed at promoting female entrepreneur role models and connecting women with entrepreneurs.

The paper utilizes a representative sample of 311,720 individuals in 35 countries. Entrepreneurs are classified as operating at three distinct phases of the entrepreneurial process: discovery, start‐up, and young and the relationship between entrepreneurial networking and entrepreneurship participation is examined within each of these phases.

By adding an alter perspective to the traditional ego perspective on gender differences in entrepreneurial networks, the purpose of this study is to investigate whether involvement of family members who are not partners and exchange of emotional support is associated not only with the gender of the entrepreneurs but also the gender of entrepreneurs' alters.

Building on homophily theory, relational theory and social support theory, three hypotheses are developed and tested on a representative sample of Danish entrepreneurs and their alters. A hierarchical logistic regression approach is applied.

It is found that female focal entrepreneurs are more likely to involve female and family members who are not partners. Furthermore, it was found that female focal entrepreneurs would more likely involve female family members while male focal entrepreneurs would more likely involve male family members. And finally, it was found that females and males are equally likely to receive emotional support while females are more likely to provide it.

An important lesson from this study is that both focal actors and alters have an essential role in the entrepreneurial act and that females and males perform different roles and functions as both the focal entrepreneurs and as alters.

This study is unique in the sense that it adds an alter perspective to the traditional ego perspective on entrepreneurial networks.

This article aims to investigate the practice adopted by entrepreneurs regarding their use of consultants through the business life cycle.

A representative sample of Danish entrepreneurs was surveyed with response rates of 73 percent and 92 percent. The Danish GEM population survey was merged with own follow‐up surveys and statistically analyzed.

The survey results reveal that involvement of consultants increases as entrepreneurs move forward in the business life cycle. As entrepreneurs gain access to more resources, and as their problems become more fragmented, specialised, discrete and business oriented, the feasibility and benefit of consultant involvement becomes more viable. It was further found that older entrepreneurs have a higher tendency to involve consultants and that entrepreneurs mostly discuss economic and financial issues with consultants to whom they are mostly weakly connected.

Compared to other people in entrepreneurs' social networks, entrepreneurs mostly discuss financial issues with consultants with whom they are mostly relatively weakly connected.

It is suggested that a publicly‐supported advisory system should continue its effort in the early stages where entrepreneurs have only scarce resources. Further it is suggested that this advisory should be even more concentrated towards other issues than financial issues such as marketing, strategy, coordination, and specific opportunity development.

The research extends previous studies by integrating advisory literature and social network literature. The introduction of the business life cycle is also new. The results are based on a very solid research design.

Using an entrepreneurial network perspective, this article seeks to investigate the involvement of family members during early stages of the entrepreneurial process – the time from intention until the business is established.

A multivariate statistical regression analysis was carried out on data generated through two associated data collections: the Danish Global Entrepreneurship Monitor population survey and a connected follow‐up survey using the name‐generator approach.

The survey results reveal that the family members’ involvement differs depending on the phase of the entrepreneurial process. Family members are most strongly involved in the emergence phase when the final decision to start or not has to be made. Furthermore, involvement of family members is most common when entrepreneurs are young and have higher education of no more than three years duration. Family members tend to be males with whom entrepreneurs have strong ties and these family members tend to be more critical than other actors in other role‐relationships.

The article provides empirical support for a family embedded perspective on entrepreneurship.

The study uses a representative sample of entrepreneurs across four phases of the entrepreneurial process which enables an investigation on how family inclusion changes during the entrepreneurial process.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of the special interests of key decision makers in entrepreneurship policy formation at the national level. The core question is: what is the role that special interests play in a situation with significantly improved evidence through a growing number of high-quality international benchmark studies on entrepreneurial performance.

An ethnographic method is applied to analyse in depth the 2005 decision by the Danish Government to shift from a volume-oriented to a growth-oriented entrepreneurship policy. This decision process is an extreme case since Denmark has world-class evidence of its entrepreneurial performance.

Even in such a well-investigated country, which since 2000 has had a pioneering role in the development of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor study and international register-based studies, the special interests of a few top-level politicians and civil servants have significantly influenced the decision to shift the overall policy. These special interests guided the interpretation of the ambiguous evidence provided by these two benchmark studies.

Policy makers are made aware of the need to take a critical view on international benchmark studies, asking what is studied and how and realising that “the truth” about a country’s entrepreneurial performance cannot be found in just one study.

The theoretical value of this paper is its challenge to the widespread rationality view in the entrepreneurship policy field and a deepened understanding of how the pursuit of special interests is related to ambiguous evidence and system-level rationality.

The purpose of this paper is to explore gender differences in the composition of entrepreneurs' networks at four new venture stages: discovery, emergence, young, and established.

The study used ANOVA and linear regression on a sample of 134 female and 266 male entrepreneurs.

Female entrepreneurs have significantly lower proportions of males in their social networks in early venture development stages, but similar levels at later stages.

Taken together, the findings suggest that, just as women in traditional organizations adapt social networks similar to men in order to succeed, their entrepreneurial counterparts build more “male‐oriented” networks as they proceed through venture phases.

This study uses a representative sample of male and female entrepreneurs to explore network composition at four distinct stages. The findings suggest that female entrepreneurs who are able to persist in the new venture process develop networks similar to their male counterparts.

The aim of the article is to explore the dynamics of the management consulting process for small firms as an outcome of interactive processes.

The explorative study is based on a summary sketch of an interactive research project (LOS) in which small firms and their interactions with management consultants were studied in a three‐year perspective. The theoretical framework employed is based on the industrial network theory.

The study suggests that clients are co‐producers of the consulting process. Therefore, management consulting in a interactive perspective has important elements of trailing, i.e. changing the frames of reference of the consulting process and creating room for consulting in which the consultant, as well as the client, allow themselves to experiment with their professional foundations. However, it is also suggested that innovative learning processes are difficult to foster in management consulting processes.

The empirical foundation of this explorative study is limited and thus invites to further interactive studies along the paradigm of action research.

Based on the findings, it seems important that both clients and consultants accept the consulting process as a co‐productive process, and that they find a way to work out the expectation gap at the beginning of the process.

The study adopts an industrial network perspective on the consulting process. In this perspective social exchange and adaptation processes among actors, i.e. consultant and client are in focus.