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Drawing on the most up-to-date and relevant research, this concise textbook is an accessible guide to harnessing the appropriate resources when launching a new start-up business. The focus is on the wide range of tangible and intangible resources available to entrepreneurs in the early stages of a new venture. This second edition brings in material on crowdfunding, digitalization and Covid-19, and dedicates new chapters to: lean start-ups and business models idea generation and opportunity development and business incubators and accelerators. The book supports students with learning objectives, a summary, discussion questions and a practical call to action in each chapter. A teaching guide and slides are also available for instructors. Resourcing the Start-up Business will be a valuable textbook for students of entrepreneurship and new venture creation globally.

This book introduces concepts of business incubation and suggests a learning process. This process begins with prior knowledge at the opportunity identification phase, progresses through the acquisition of new skills and knowledge necessary to develop an opportunity and concludes with a transformation phase where new knowledge is acted upon. The book draws on extensive qualitative data and documentary evidence from a range of stakeholders associated with a University Business Incubator known as Innospace. The process of opportunity development within the business incubator is explored by combining experiential and social learning theories as heuristic tools. Presented implications for policy-makers and incubator managers are that attention and scarce resources should be focused on providing relevant information and encouraging an atmosphere of learning and mutual support. Recruitment practices should be revised to include a more holistic appreciation of potential incubatees contribution to the Business Incubation learning community as well as an assessment of their business plans. For policy makers the book suggests that successful business incubators do not necessarily require a large financial investment in state-of-the-art premises and technology. Appropriate management training together with carefully selected incubatees can create an effective learning community where opportunities are developed and transformed into enterprises and individuals into entrepreneurs.

Starting a business successfully requires numerous skills and resources. The alarming rate of failures associated with new ventures suggests that potential entrepreneurs would welcome expert advice at the most vital stage in the life of any business. The expert author team focus on those resources, skills, capabilities and learning required by any entrepreneur in the process of starting a new business. Specifically, this text aims to: Introduce and explain those resources (including finance) that are essential to successful business creation Identify the key skills and capabilities that are required by entrepreneurs Highlight the ways in which new resources are combined with the entrepreneur's existing resource base to develop the business effectively Explore the way entrepreneurs learn in the process of developing their business Drawing on the most up-to-date and most relevant research, this concise textbook provides students and academics of entrepreneurship with a practical guide to acquiring the appropriate resources in order to start a new firm.

This book provides a detailed, multi-disciplinary analysis of innovation networks in a variety of organisational settings. All the contributors are employed at Aston Business School, which is one of the UK's foremost institutions in terms of both teaching and research. The book illustrates the way in which innovation networks are formed and sustained in a variety of organisational settings: the public sector, public-private collaboration, national policy level, inter-organisational credit links, as well as the more traditional focus on manufacturing firms. The strength of the network approach is that it encourages detailed analyses of the dyadic links which must be mobilised in the innovation process. At the same time, networks provide a framework for exploring the multiple sources and pluralistic patterns of communication typical of innovatory activity. Therefore, in contrast to much of the innovation network research undertaken in recent years, the focus of this book is as much on notions of “network as method” as on “network as phenomenon”.