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This article applies social identity theory to examine how identification with social groups shapes the entrepreneurial endeavours of individuals aged 50 or over who start businesses when unemployed or under threat of redundancy. Understanding what drives older individuals to start a business as an alternative to unemployment has important policy implications: governments are interested in promoting self-employment to reduce benefits dependence among older individuals for whom finding employment in the traditional labour market can be difficult. Our exploratory analysis is based on data collected in 21 personal interviews with senior entrepreneurs in the UK who received support from an organisation dedicated to foster enterprising activity among older unemployed people. Our findings suggest that income levels beyond making ends meet is not an important motive for starting a business among this demographic group. Instead, our data highlight the relevance of non-monetary self-rewards—such as pursuit of autonomy, self-realisation, and wanting to feel active, useful and valuable—for senior entrepreneurs who start businesses under adverse conditions. This finding resonates with the European Commission's policy of promoting 'active ageing'. Our analysis indicates non-monetary objectives should be included in any conceptualisation of self-interest in an entrepreneurial context. ; Peer reviewed

New Venture Support Networks (NVSN) are a political instrument with the aim of improving coordination between private and public organizations involved in new venture support in a region. Cooperation between these organizations should improve the overall quality of new venture support and increase its transparency to potential entrepreneurs. However, achieving cooperation between organizations with heterogeneous interests is particularly difficult when the network has been initiated 'artificially' as part of a political programme. This paper examines the concept of NVSN theoretically focusing on network cooperation, and illustrates the concepts with empirical examples from exploratory interviews conducted in five NVSN established in 1998 in Germany within the government initiative 'EXIST – Entrepreneurs from Universities'. The preliminary conclusions suggest that there is a need for improvement and further investigation concerning the framework of rules and incentives set by the political programme, and the roles of certain key actors as 'motors' of self-organization in NVSN.

New Venture Support Networks (NVSN) are a political instrument for the purpose of contributing to regional economic development by fostering more and qualitatively better start-ups. NVSN bundle together different available sources of information and consultation for potential entrepreneurs, including e.g. authorities, universities, financial institutions, trade associations and private consultants. Achieving effective cooperation between such a wide range of institutions is not a simple task. The initial situation is often characterised by conflicts between the varying individual interests of the participants and the politically defined goal of fostering more and better start-ups. Moreover, since the network has been established by a political initiative for a pre-determined funding period, the actor relations within it are "artificial" (as opposed to naturally developed). Thus, the actors lack common experiences, social bonds, values and other common motivators contributing to trust-based cooperative relationships. Such relationships are a crucial factor in turning the "artificial" network into a "real" one, which continues to exist also after the political funding period is over. Our hypothesis is that certain key actors are a critical success factor in developing NVSN into "real" networks. Following the "promoter model" – an expansion of champion models that has established itself in the German innovation management literature – we suggest that there are administrative, organisational and know-how related barriers that are detrimental to the development of NVSN. The overcoming of these barriers requires a combination of different organisational resources, which the promoter model discusses in terms of three different ideal types: promoter by power, promoter by know-how, and relationship promoter. One person can act in one or more of these roles simultaneously and the roles can appear in different combinations, known as promoter structures. The specific research objectives of the proposed paper are to identify a) the types of barriers faced in the different developmental stages of NVSN and b) the roles the key actors play and the resources they use in coping with them. Our sample consists of key actors in five regional NVSN in Germany, which were established in 1998 as part of the governmental initiative "EXIST – Entrepreneurs from Universities". The author team is also involved in one of these networks. Using a grounded theory based qualitative approach, we intend to map the development process of these NVSN with respect to the above research objectives. The contribution of the study is two-fold: 1) It presents the first application of the promoter model in the context of NVSN and produces tentative results that can be used as a basis for further research. 2) It offers practical implications to NVSN by analysing how their effectiveness and continuity could be improved by an effective use of promoter structures.

This paper explores the role of different trust environments in West and East Europe on the behavior of entrepreneurs. In a stable institutional environment (e.g., Germany, core regions in Russia) personal trust mainly plays a complementary role for entrepreneurial behavior, while in more fragile environments (e.g., peripheral regions in Russia) it can substitute for institutional deficiencies. The exploratory empirical data analyzed in this study comprise three countries (Estonia, Germany and Russia), and they stem from an international research project, which was supported by the Volkswagen Foundation. The empirical discussion focuses in particular on interfirm relations of small businesses as well as on the sources of assistance used by entrepreneurs in solving business problems. The preliminary results indicate that the forms of trust depend on the respective regional and sectoral environments, which draws attention to the difficulties of classifying whole countries as "high-trust" versus "low-trust". Limitations of the analysis refer to the cross-sectional nature of the survey data.