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Bureau of Business Research Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek

The latest State Entrepreneurship Index published by the Bureau of Business Research (BBR) was featured in a recent Bloomberg Businessweek article. The BBR is an applied economic and business research entity of the College of Business Administration at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, located within the economics department.

Dr. Eric Thompson, director of the BBR, talked to Bloomberg about the State Entrepreneurship Index which is a research publication designed to measure the impact and direction of entrepreneurship activity in Nebraska and other states.

One index the research examined was to identify areas of the United States that are favorable to startup businesses. The research pointed to the Northeast and West Coast as being the best locations to consider starting a new company.

"The states where the traditional model of economic development has been starting companies — such as in the Northeast, such as California and other states in the Northwest — that tends to continue because they’ve got the investors, they’ve got a concentration of experienced entrepreneurs that allow them to create high-income entrepreneurship even in the difficult economic conditions,” Thompson said.

Thompson also noted that when it comes favorable conditions for starting new companies, it helps when an existing network of suppliers and customers is already in place. For states that don't have those favorable conditions, Thompson says it can be difficult to recreate those dynamics.

The State Entrepreneurship Index comes out every three years and ranks states using the number of business that open and close, the average earnings of its entrepreneurs, the number of patents per capita, and other data. The current research was written by Van Tran, UNL economics graduate student, Dr. William Walstad, John T. and Mable M. Hay Professor of Economics and Dr. Eric Thompson.

Published: August 9, 2011