Factors Resulting in Successes and Failures for Small Businesses in the Small Business Institute Program at Syracuse University
During the 1970s the U.S. Congress inaugurated a program of managerial assistance to meld the talents and needs of local small-business communities, nearby educational institutions of higher business learning, and the U.S. Small Business Administration. This program was known as the Small Business Institute. The authors analyzed the experience of Syracuse University with the program from 1973 to 1997 and found that some problems faced by small businesses persisted over time, although there were significant shifts in other problems as the economic environment changed. We also found that the chances for survival of our client firms varied by industry, with manufacturing, retailing, and professional and nonprofessional service firms most likely to survive.
Skill-Based Development of Entrepreneurs and the Role of Personal and Peer Group Coaching in Enterprise Development
This article argues that skill building lies at the heart of entrepreneurs' success, and it seeks to begin the process of understanding how skills can best be developed. The authors begin with a discussion of skill building and why it must be the focus of productive enterprise development efforts. They then examine a unique enterprise development program in central Appalachia that uses a system of blended personal and peer group coaching to develop the skills of its client entrepreneurs. By triangulating the results of in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs, coaches, and the managers of the program, the research reported here creates a set of comparative case studies that sheds light on how coaching can affect the way entrepreneurs learn. The findings have implications for how entrepreneurs can be more effectively assisted.
Institutionalizing Corporate Social Responsibility: A Study of Provisions and Implications of Indian Companies Act 2013
Abstract 
The spotlight of this chapter is to understand the connection between public policy and corporate social responsibility (CSR); in other words – the institutionalization of CSR. What is the role of the government for setting standards and mandating for ensuring responsibility? The emerging accepted wisdom in policy and academic circles is that many sustainability solutions are likely to result from institutional (i.e., governance) reform. A perceptive on CSR evolving as an institution of broader societal governance appears as a promising opportunity to delve into at a point in time when conventional rules, actors, and markets that steered the global economy demonstrate to be undergoing credibility crisis. CSR therefore must be considered within the wider field of institutions for governing the corporation and the economy. This chapter is exploratory as it dwells into theoretical underpinning of emerging mandatory CSR as well as provides empirical mapping of corporate responses to the new enacted legislation. The CSR analysis presented is based on a content analysis of the information contained in the annual reports of some prominent companies, government documents, audits reports, companies websites, and newspaper reports, which will provide us evidences of responses of corporates toward the CSR provisions.