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In the international arena, there is an ongoing debate over the lack of newly started businesses in general and over how to obtain sustainable growth in these businesses in particular. Policy-makers in Europe have sought to ease this problem of paucity of new firm's start-ups, which is mainly caused by a lack of financial resources for new innovative ideas as problematic (European Commission (2007–2013); Groen, Jenniskens, & van der Sijde, 2005). Consequently, during the latest decade, there has been an increase in the number of public sector financial schemes designed to promote entrepreneurship in very early-stage businesses (COM, 2005, 2006). These efforts have, however, escaped criticism. Those who promote public financing believe that with the right tools and governance this type of support is an important complement to the private sector financial market (Oakey, 2003). However, bankers and venture capitalists often state that the main issue is not the lack of available capital but the inability of entrepreneurs to convince investors of the merits of their business ideas (Mason & Harrison, 2002). There have also been arguments against the socioeconomic efficiency (Storey, 1994).

Understanding the factors behind successful enterprise policy interventions are critical in ensuring effective programme development. The aim of this paper is to analyse an academic-industry initiative in Sweden developed to support knowledge-intensive businesses in expanding their operations.

This paper describes a case study of a specific policy intervention to facilitate further business growth and development. Since 1986, 490 individuals from 194 companies have attended the Business Development Programme (BDP) organised by Linköping University. Through analysing interviews with participants on the programme, the paper examines the origins and motivations behind its creation, management and development.

This study finds that future policy interventions in enterprise development must cultivate an open style of learning, similar to the principles of open innovation, which engages directly with the participants, is based on a process of informality and flexibility, reflects the needs of the business and includes engaged programme leadership based on a successful entrepreneurial track record.

The programme has succeeded through an informal, flexible and needs-orientated approach that essentially reflects the needs of the participating businesses.

Interventions that are targeted towards supporting established businesses could help to create wealth and employment. However, understanding the factors behind such interventions is critical in ensuring that policymakers design the most relevant programmes to assist support businesses that have the potential to grow.

This chapter aims to enrich knowledge about cluster initiatives acting as intermediaries primarily between members in a cluster or in regional context. This is a practically oriented manuscript written to contribute to refinement of existing policies by proposing recommendations based on recent empirical studies regarding funding, actors’ and activities’ content, as well as cluster initiatives’ assessment. It is proposed that public support should be balanced, targeting new as well as established, well-functioning cluster initiatives. Furthermore, regional authorities should encourage multifaceted collaboration (e.g., Triple Helix), stimulate variation in activities to maximize the benefit of cluster initiatives as well as define and communicate success factors that make it possible to evaluate cluster initiatives from a holistic perspective. These recommendations are primary aimed for regional authorities and reflect a bottom-up perspective where both logic of initiatives’ actions and their development are captured. Yet, even national authorities can make use of the recommendations in this chapter to improve governance of cluster initiatives and to determine further directions of regional policies.

There is growing worldwide interest in entrepreneurship and new business development. This has become particularly widespread in Sweden during the last 10 years. We see more and more professorships in entrepreneurship at our universities, new credit-bearing courses on entrepreneurship are emerging and different training programmes for those who want to start new firms are being developed. Among established firms, we are also seeing much activity, for example Swedish firms such as Ericsson, Telia and Saab have in recent years instituted activities to stimulate fresh ideas through intrapreneurship and take advantage of the energy and ideas of individuals involved in the day-to-day operation of their businesses. The trend is clear — the number of initiatives aimed at stimulating the entrepreneurial behaviour of individuals is growing.

In Sweden today there are many initiatives to stimulate individuals to act in an entrepreneurial manner, including professorships in entrepreneurialism at universities, new courses and training programmes, while firms such as Ericsson, Telia and Saab have established “innovation units” to stimulate new ideas and utilize the energy and ideas of their employees. The purpose of this article is to describe and analyse such an initiative: the Entrepreneurship and New Business Development Programme (the ENP‐programme) for the training of individuals in the start‐up of new technology‐based or knowledge‐intensive enterprises. The model has been developed by the Centre for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Linköping University and a private network of enterprises. This article begins with a comprehensive discussion on what characterises entrepreneurs and what implications this has in the training of individuals. Subsequently, the ENP‐programme, feedback from the participants in the programme, and what characterises a successful entrepreneurship programme are presented.

This chapter focuses on two major concepts in entrepreneurship training, namely coaching and mentoring. A study of these concepts reveals at least two schools of thought, that coaching and mentoring are two parallel and distinct activities that can be used to support each other, and that coaching and mentoring are not separate activities — coaching is considered part of the mentoring activity or mentoring part of the coaching activity. Data from 36 university-based training programmes and 450 coaching and mentoring cases at 7 Swedish universities were analysed. We used a checklist to gather information on 21 items linked to these 4 distinctive groups: first structural issues (mission, form and task); second, process issues (i.e. connection to programme content, meeting environment, problem solving, assessing the opportunity or idea, operative role, confidentiality and networking); third relationship (i.e. extent, meeting, initiative, homework, documentation and follow-up) and fourth character of the coach and mentor (background and experience, engagement, integrity, social skills and role or ethics).

Coaching and mentoring differed markedly, for example in terms of mission, problem solving and use of generalist versus specialist competence. Similarities occurred in the areas of opportunity or idea assessment, and meeting environment, operative role and confidentiality agreements. The authors are convinced that the coach and the mentor have different roles in helping the young individual to become a better entrepreneur. Coaching and mentoring were found to be parallel activities that complement each other.

Small to medium‐sized enterprise (SME) evaluation models lack a clear coupling to innovation and its impact on firm performance. A model which can achieve this is the Survival Index Value (SIV) model. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the ability of the SIV model to indicate and predict the performance of a company. The firm, Autoadapt AB, is an innovation‐oriented enterprise, adapting personal cars to be driven by handicapped people. The authors knew in advance about the good performance of the firm and its high efficiency in conducting its operations and expected the SIV model to reflect correctly on Autoadapt's performance. Because the handicap degree of each of the individuals who benefit from the firm activities differs from one person to another, product solutions have to be individually designed. Therefore the firm has had to pursue a high level of innovativeness and it had to abide with this policy right from the start. The product development processes in the firm needed to adapt to such strategies.

To be able to demonstrate the ability of the SIV model to indicate a positive performance due to the intensive innovation activities of Autoadapt AB, a case study approach was used. Case studies are very suited for in‐depth analysis of an object under a longer period of time. It is a widely‐used research method in firm performance studies.

The results of the SIV analysis indicated that the model is able to project correctly the performance of the object firm. At all the four levels of analysis, i.e. SI values, the SPI slope, the survival factors, and the survivability coefficients, the SIV analysis performance indicated a stable positive development of the firm through the life time of the enterprise.

Measuring performance of SMEs is an important issue. There are couple of models stemming from the traditional accountancy disciplines in use; however these models suffer from clear disadvantages. Recently a new model, the SIV model, was introduced and has shown the ability of being a better candidate for performance analysis. The paper demonstrates the ability of the SIV model to judge correctly the performance of an innovative firm.

Today's academic literature on new technology-based firms is rather growth and success-oriented, despite the fact that many valuable lessons can be learned from failures. This study aims at contributing to our understanding of failure processes by documenting five case studies of spin-offs that originated from European universities. Within the framework of the resource-based view of the firm and social capital theory, the venture's resource base is used as a central element in explaining the failures through the presence or absence of certain resources or by inappropriate application. The analysis mainly illustrated the negative influence of the lack of a champion, poor market development, the absence of market(ing) experience in the venture team and an unbalanced shareholder structure. The relatively small financial base seems rarely to be the main issues in the failure process.