Identifying, selecting and exploiting the right new business opportunities are the essence of entrepreneurial activities and among the most important abilities of a successful entrepreneur. Shane and Venkataraman (2000) define entrepreneurship as the processes of discovery, evaluation, and exploitation of opportunities in order to create future goods and services. In broad terms, Ardichvili, et. al (2003) define an opportunity as “the chance to meet a market need (or interest or want) through a creative combination of resources to deliver superior value. Eckhardt and Shane (2003) define entrepreneurial opportunities as those “situations in which new goods, services, raw materials and organizing methods can be introduced through the formation of new means, ends, or means-ends relationships”.
According to Burgelman (1983), corporate entrepreneurship refers to “the process whereby firms engage in diversification through internal development”. This diversification often requires new resources combinations to extend the firm's activities in areas dissimilar, or marginally similar, to its current domain of competence and corresponding opportunity set. Sharma and Chrisman (1999) define a corporate entrepreneurship as “the process whereby an individual or a group of individuals, in association with an existing organization, create a new organization or instigate renewal or innovation within that organization”. In large established Firms, corporate entrepreneurship is an important tool for business development, revenue growth and as a promising path to enhance financial returns (Miles and Covin, 2002) and contribute to the achievement of some company’s strategic objectives (Rind, 1981). Corporate entrepreneurship is characterized by the use of internal or external corporate venturing to pursue innovation opportunities (Chesbrough, H., 2000).
Along the recent years, the notion of copula provides an ideal tool to construct models for extreme moves in correlation and more general measures of dependence both in finance and insurance. In the static case, we can choose the best copula adjusted on the whole period according to different criteria: for instance, the AIC criterion (Akaike, (1974)) or D2 diagnostic (Caillault and Guégan, (2005)), or attaching importance in the forecast such as VaR and ES. In the same time we can consider both the empirical copula and the analytical copula specifying the kernels.
Most of data considered for research covers a reasonably long period relatively to the provided time horizon. Thus, one may expect that economic factors induced changes in dependence structures since the basic properties of financial assets are not the same in the stable periods and during the crisis. Therefore, when we inspect some changes in the dependence concepts, we should carry out a structure in a dynamic way.
Small business access to credit has been turned upside down in the United States over the last 30 years. It has moved from a difficult problem for small business owners and managers as a group to a relatively modest one. The transformation is largely due to financial services deregulation, information technology, and finance innovation. Prominent among the latter is credit scoring. These developments raise policy issues that are relevant to all developed countries. Among them are: how does one measure and monitor small business credit access? What reassessments need to be made now that credit scoring has mitigated the market failure argument supporting government subsidized small business finance programs? What are the dimensions of a small business credit market? How will recent financial innovation withstand a severe recession? Within the bounds of safety and soundness, what can/should be done to promote de novo bank entry? And, what is the future of conventional small business loan-backed securitization in the light of the sub-prime debacle?
Global forces have transformed the financial systems of all developed countries. Yet, when considering those changes and their implications for small business access to credit, all countries start from a different point. The author’s comments focus on the changes American small business experienced accessing credit over the last 30 years, not because the U.S. experience is more instructive than any other nor because the American financial system is somehow more advanced, but simply because he knows it better and can use its context to develop implications for small business that appear applicable to most, if not all, of the world’s developed countries.
