Modeling the Economic Returns to Entrepreneurial Behavior

Recently, management scholars have highlighted the relativeineffectiveness of isolating mechanisms to sustain competitiveadvantage in today?s complex business environment. Instead, theyhave argued that firms need to take an entrepreneurial approach tostrategy constantly searching for new profit opportunities andupdating their sources of competitive advantage. The aim of thisbook is to provide a framework for evaluating the returns toentrepreneurial behavior. Several characteristics ofentrepreneurial returns pose significant challenges for developingthis framework. In particular, entrepreneurial returns are ex anteuncertain, driven by unique and complex behavior, and temporary.This work utilizes economic theory, simulation tools (systemdynamics modeling and agent-based simulation modeling) as well asconcepts from community ecology to explore the dynamics of theentrepreneurial process and to capture the returns to variousentrepreneurial behaviors. This book should be useful to businessscholars, as well as business managers, venture capitalists andpolicy makers interested in improving the entrepreneurialperformance of their businesses or business environments.