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Business Venture (business + venture)
Selected Abstracts,Between Business and Community': A Rural Co-op and Its Accounting PracticeFINANCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY & MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2001Stig Westerdahl A rural co-op in the north of Sweden has grown from a tiny development-group to a small business venture with houses, a shop and an old-age home. This progress is here described focusing on the accounting practice. Field-studies, including participatory methods and interviews, depict a co-op torn between their founding ideas on shaping a good life in the area, and an increasing focus on business. This tension is also reflected in their usage of accounting. The conclusion of the study is that identity and accounting are shown to be mutually inter-linked. It is further argued, drawing on ethnomethodological concepts, that the main asset in the development, a community based on trust, cannot be mirrored in the formal accounts. The alternative is approaches more akin to narratives. [source] Information Linkages in Local Economic DevelopmentGROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2000Stephan Weiler Profitable private investments may be bypassed in struggling regions due precisely to such regions' isolation, leading to a self-reinforcing cycle of marginalization. In many cases, development in such regions may be most effectively promoted by providing key information to the private and public sectors, thus addressing potentially significant market failures. In the case study project, the calculation of private and social returns have been particularly crucial in sparking both private investor interest and public support of this business venture. The project's example suggests an updated role for universities in the assistance of productive economic development programs. [source] TRANSFORMING ENRON: THE VALUE OF ACTIVE MANAGEMENTJOURNAL OF APPLIED CORPORATE FINANCE, Issue 4 2001Vince Kaminski Soon after Enron was formed as a regulated gas pipeline company in 1985, economic events forced a dramatic reorganization of the company. The result was the creation of an unregulated energy trading operation whose mission was to capitalize on opportunities arising from the deregulation of the natural gas market The initial form of the new business was that of a "gas bank" in which Enron became an intermediary between buyers and sellers of gas, locking in the spread as profit. Since there was no source of liquidity to the market, Enron had to develop its own risk management system. Furthermore, the need to respond quickly to rapidly changing market conditions required that Enron flatten its organizational structure and hire new people whose skills were better suited to the new decentralized organization. The focus of the new Enron accordingly became human and intellectual capital, not physical assets. Employees were encouraged to move about the firm to staff new business ventures. And in what may well be a unique feature in corporate America, Enron's top management today uses its human capital flows to guide its allocations of financial capital. Other aspects of the Enron model include attempts to capitalize on the option (as opposed to current DCF) value of assets, recognition of the value of networks in adding value to trading platforms, and the use of mark-to-market accounting for business transactions as a means of ensuring transparency and promoting timely decision-making. [source] RISK, PERSISTENCE and FOCUS: A LIFE CYCLE OF THE ENTREPRENEURAUSTRALIAN ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 3 2005Ian Hunter Business lifecycle; business failure; entrepreneurship; New Zealand; colonisation Adapting a life cycle model from managerial literature, conclusions are drawn about the nature of colonial entrepreneurship from a case analysis of 133 New Zealand entrepreneurs, active between 1880 and 1910. Five stages in the life cycle of the entrepreneur are investigated: preparation, embarkation, exploration, expansion and transformation. Characteristic behaviours observed include the prevalence of entrepreneurial partnerships; a propensity for commencing multiple business ventures; and persistence in the face of business failure. Strategically, the colonial entrepreneur leveraged personal skills and abilities as a modus operandi for business expansion, often relying on family ownership and family management structures. [source] |