Die Autoren untersuchen folgende Fragen: Welche Bedeutung haben FuE-Kooperationen in der Praxis? Wie verbreitet sind solche Kooperationen im deutschen Mittelstand und welche Faktoren bestimmen den Kooperationserfolg? Welche Rolle spielt opportunistisches Verhalten in diesem Zusammenhang bzw. wie kann sich das Management eines Unternehmens davor schützen?

Start-ups and their respective market partners are faced with severe problems of asymmetric information due to their lack of prior production history and reputation. Given this situation, it is most likely that outside financiers will not be informed about the potential gains, losses, and risks of the new venture. In our paper, we study how banks screen the abilities of the entrepreneurs. We argue that specific characteristics of the educational history of individuals signal their quality as founders. Namely, we expect banks to also use quot;college dropoutquot; as an indicator when deciding to extend credit to a founder. We empirically test our hypotheses using a dataset of 189 German start-ups collected in 1998/99. Our hypothesis is borne out by the data. Applying ordered probit techniques we find that college dropouts have more difficulties to obtain the credit they need in the beginning of their start-up than those without college dropout experience.

The decision to become an entrepreneur does not only have economic determinants. Using a unique data set of individuals who visited business start-up exhibitions and applying logit and probit techniques we show that entrepreneurial self-perception has a strong impact on entrepreneurial activity (i.e. the propensity as well as the probability to become an entrepreneur). The addition of entrepreneurial self-perception to a conventional set of control variables significantly increases the predictive accuracy of our estimated equations. But contrary to main-stream theory, entrepreneurial self-perception has no specific gender effect. This finding holds true although statistics presented include both cross-section and time-series variation.

This paper investigates the determinants of inter-firm cooperation in research and development (R&D). We analyze the impact of structural and firm specific characteristics, market performance, access to resources and managerial techniques on different types of inter firm R&D cooperation. Based on a survey of 886 enterprises in manufacturing and industry/business-related services located in Germany we estimate several models with different types of R&D partnerships as a dependent variable to find out which types of enterprises are more or less likely to form or join either type of R&D partnership. The findings suggest that the availability and the quality of a firm's own R&D resources are common factors driving R&D cooperation in general. Differentiating between cooperation activities in R&D among enterprises on the same production level on the one hand side and vertical cooperation between enterprises and suppliers/customers or cross-sector alliances between enterprises and public research institutes on the other hand side, we find cooperation type specific determinants of entry. Size of a firm, its location, access to financial resources and network experience seem to be most important.

The paper analyzes the effect of team-size on effort in start-up teams. We extend the model of Kandel and Lazear (1992) to study the joint effect of free-riding and peer pressure, which both dependent on team size in our model. The special characteristic of start-up teams is their unique monitoring technology, which is characterized primarily by spatial proximity and high-frequency decision making. For such teams our model predicts an inverted U-shape relation between effort and team-size. Based on a large sample of start-ups we find strong evidence for the inverted U-shape relationship, with maximum effort in teams with three members.

Based on the finding that entrepreneurs who found new firms tend to work as employees of small rather than large firms prior to start-up, we test how different working conditions, which enhance entrepreneurial learning, affect their decision to become entrepreneurs when moderated by firm size. Based on data of the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we find a significant relationship between entrepreneurial learning (extracted in an orthogonal factor analysis based on twelve working conditions as proxy for entrepreneurial human capital and work experience) and firm size when predicting the probability of leaving paid employment for self-employment. We think, that this is a special kind of knowledge spillover. We also control for other aspects such as gender, age, wage, etc. - factors that may potentially influence the decision to become self-employed. Thus, our analysis sheds new light onto the black box of SMEs as a hotbed of new start-ups.