Education, Training and Networking for Entrepreneurship in ...

Chapter 12
Entrepreneurs’ growth-expectations expanded by education, training,
competency and networking
How are entrepreneurs’ expectations for growth
formed by their learning? More specifically, this
chapter addresses the questions, What are the
separate effects upon growth-expectations from
education, from training, from competency and
from networking?
The idea of effects upon entrepreneurs’ expectations
from their education, training, competency
and networking can be symbolized as a
diagram with sequences of arrows, Figure 12.1.
Each arrow here symbolizes a hypothesized effect.
The effect may be positive or negative, and
of large or small magnitude, or it might actually
be nill. The task then is to estimate each distinct
effect, preferably while other things are equal,
and specifically ascertain whether the effect is
different from zero, positively or negatively,
and to estimate the magnitude of the effect.
These effects shall be estimated in this chapter.
Entrepreneurs’ education, training, competency
and advisory network were examined in Chapter
9, so here we focus on their expectations for
growth.
Growth here refers to the change in size of the
firm, where size is the number of persons working
for the firm. A startup venture has size 0, at
its very start, but the starter may expect to get
a number of people to work for the firm in the
Figure 12.1
Hypothesized effects upon growth-expectations from education, training, competency and
networking
Training
Education
Competency
Networking
Growth-expectation
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