Abstract

During the last two decades, one of the main topics of my research has been the effect of new business formation on regional development. Thus, in accordance with the theme of this book, I will describe the process of my personal discovery in this field: how I became attracted to the topic, the colleagues and collaborators who made significant contributions, the dominant research questions over time, what did I find, and what followed from all of this. It is my hope that this description of my research process will make understandable why and how I did things. I believe it will provide some insight into the different stages of my research on entrepreneurship and growth that would not be possible to discover from simply reading individual papers. It is a personal story of an ongoing research process that provided explanations for important phenomena and, of course, gave rise to new questions. ²