<p> The United States government manages a wide range of programs directing federal contracts to firms on the basis of criteria other than commercial suitability. Examples include goals for the percentage of contracts awarded to small businesses, preferential treatment to minority business owners and grants to small businesses for research and development. The objective of this study is to examine the effect of such programs on economic outcomes. Economic theory implies two competing hypotheses. Directing contracts based on firm characteristics orthogonal to commercial suitability may encourage rent seeking and other counterproductive behavior. Alternatively, entrenched incumbents or historical patterns of discrimination may have left &ldquo;money on the table&rdquo; in the form of smaller, more productive firms that are excluded from competition. This analysis examines which of these theories predominates by examining firm-level outcomes of preferential contracting programs. It incorporates contracting data from the Federal Procurement Data System with performance measures in the National Establishment Time Series to generate a comprehensive data set which I then analyze through a variety of quasi-experimental methods. The results are broadly consistent across programs and model specifications, suggesting the rent-seeking hypothesis, rather than the &ldquo;money-on-the-table&rdquo; hypothesis, predominates. With few exceptions, preferential contracting programs tend to inhibit growth in the overall population of participating firms and to encourage rent seeking and strategic behavior. </p>

<p> The study analyzed survey data and investment returns from 477 angel investment ventures to evaluate factors related to financial rates of return. Principal components analysis, linear regression, and nonparametric methods were used to reduce and analyze the data. The findings indicated that only the angel investor&rsquo;s perception of market risk was related to the rates of return on their investment, and that the rates of return to the angel investors was superior to alternative investments in common market indexes. Logistic regression was used to construct a model that increased predicted angel investment break even by 50% over chance.</p>

<p> This thesis introduces the question of how to intentionally build a sustainable adventure movement, which is a grassroots effort to intentionally and significantly increase the use of outdoor adventure education as an innovative educational tool for schools, communities and businesses in perpetuity. Taking a whole-systems approach and applying leading social movement and diffusion theories, the Adventure Movement Project (AMP) seeks to develop a framework for integrating outdoor adventure education into whole communities to inspire servant leadership, achieve sustainability, and drive innovation. A socially just and sustainable planet can thrive with outdoor adventure education acting as a highly effective catalyst, which drives social, economic, educational, and environmental change. To that end, this thesis presents original applications of diffusion models and social movement theories to outdoor adventure education. The research used an original Delphi study&mdash;of outdoor adventure education experts&mdash;which explored how to build a sustainable adventure movement. The study aimed to understand ideas related to best practices and successful strategies for expanding outdoor adventure education participation. Findings exemplified for increasing outdoor adventure education include embracing a clear, unified message that establishes why outdoor adventure education matters as a tool, which can lead to achieving sustainability, driving innovation, and inspiring servant leadership. A second key finding calls for outdoor adventure education to be part of something larger and through integration into the larger experiential education and sustainability movements it may reach critical mass.</p><p> <i>Key Words:</i> outdoor adventure education, sustainability, servant leadership, innovation, social movement, experiential education</p>

<p> This dissertation investigates the dairy farming industry in the Northeastern United States and, in particular, the key drivers of economic viability and competitive advantage for small and midscale commercial dairy producers. The research approach employed was a literature review combined with primary case study observation and data collection. Historical perspective has been presented to provide an overarching contextual framework for this study. Four dairy farms were purposefully selected for case study research because they represented various aspects of a pre-defined set of variables and because they demonstrated relevant similarities as well as significant differences in terms of alternative business strategy. The classical business opportunity analytical process has been customized for practical use application by small and midscale dairy farmers. This tailored process has been validated using research findings; it offers a fresh way of identifying a strategic approach in pursuit of economic viability and competitive advantage that best fits an operation's unique set of characteristics. This process is intended for practical use application on a broader scale by dairy farmers in the Northeast to facilitate their understanding of challenging industry dynamics, of emergent market opportunity and inherent potency, and of both internal and external hurdles to be overcome. Finally, recommendations for next steps have been presented.</p>

<p> This exploratory dissertation examines governmental influences during the ongoing emergence of NewSpace, which is a community of private, entrepreneurial organizations pursuing space-related business opportunities outside of the traditional NASA-Military-Industrial complex model. </p><p> While recent research has provided significant insights into how organizations, populations and communities emerge, our understanding of the influence of government in this process has been minimal. Since government is the single most important actor in the modern economy, correcting this oversight is crucial to any modeling of community emergence. As emerging communities are lacking in traditional quantitative data, and the goals of this research are exploratory rather than theory testing, an inductive, qualitative methodology is utilized. The first step towards understanding governmental influence during the emergence of a new community is documenting exactly what the government does in this environment. Chapter IV uses grounded theory methodology to produce a Taxonomy of Governmental Roles in the Emergence of High-Technology Communities. The question of whether government facilitates the creation of new industries - or whether entrepreneurs manipulate government - is of critical importance to researchers of entrepreneurship and policy. Chapter V uses historical analysis to consider the causal role of government in the establishment of the environment in which this new community of organizations is emerging. Institutional legitimacy is crucial to the survival of entrepreneurial firms as well as to new populations and communities. Chapter VI considers the government's key role as legitimizer, and proposes a theoretical model for the process of legitimacy transfer from governmental agencies to entrepreneurial firms, populations and communities. </p><p> This dissertation makes contributions to the literatures of organizational evolution, community emergence, institutional theory, entrepreneurship and policy. It offers researchers a framework to better model governmental influence. It also provides entrepreneurs with a holistic view of governmental influence on their environments and offers governmental actors a fuller understanding of the impact that their legislation and enforcement activities have on new organizations and industries.</p>

<p> Local retail jewelry leaders of Saudi Arabian (S.A.) small to medium enterprises (SMEs) have struggled to survive through declining profits and increasing business foreclosures, thus threatening the sustainability of the Saudi retail sector and the Saudi economy. A globalization strategy to enhance profitability for jewelry retail SMEs in S.A. is needed, given the limited options for improving profitability. Despite this acknowledged need, leaders in S.A. have refrained from such a strategy because they lack knowledge of economic attraction features to target in the globalization process. The purpose of this quantitative correlational study using discriminant analysis was to examine specific countries' economic attraction features in the historical globalization strategy of a leading U.S. global jewelry company that could facilitate the implementation of a successful globalization strategy for a local Saudi jewelry SME retail company. The study addressed the effects of 6 independent predictor variables of 25 target countries' economic attractions on the dependent grouping variable, which distinguished among 3 order-of-entry groups according to the U.S. company's date of entry in each country between 1972 and 2009. Results indicated that except for the Hofstede index, no other variable had a significant role in the classification of the target countries. Because there was a scarcity of research on this topic, the study is beneficial for its theoretical and academic value, and may be practical for the derivative benefits of catalyzing business growth by empowering leaders of local, successful luxury brands in S.A. to implement their own globalization expansion process and increase employment in the Middle East.</p>

Geographic clusters of firms have been extensively studied in different bodies of literature, but little attention has been paid to the process of cluster formation and its determinants. While focusing on the effects of clusters on innovations and on the productivity of firms, the literature has neglected the agency of entrepreneurs in cluster emergence. This thesis aims to contribute to the literature on clusters by studying the role of personal networks and firm networks in three aspects of the emergence of clusters: 1) the early stages of formation; 2) the creation of business relations between firms; and 3) the creation of knowledge among clustered firms. The analysis was conducted using the biotechnology sector in four geographic regions of Chile as a case study. Data on firms was collected using in-depth interviews and a survey. The analysis of the data was carried out using content analysis, multilevel estimations and econometric analysis. The results reveal three main findings. First, the personal and business relations of entrepreneurs can determine the location decisions of firms. Second, personal relations are positively associated with the emergence of formal business relations between firms. Third, the number of personal and business connections a firm has positively affects its production of knowledge, measured as patent applications and scientific journals. These findings suggest that social networks within a cluster shape its emergence and development. The results also show that the different types of networks coexisting in a cluster - personal networks, business networks and research networks, among others - affect one another and determine the development of clusters. The implications of this research may be helpful for policy-makers, professional associations and cluster managers. Activities to foster personal interaction between members of a cluster and other key actors - universities, incubators, venture capital firms, government agencies, etc. - may generate collaborations between firms that would not otherwise emerge.