ABSTRACT
Entrepreneurship can be defined as the process by which new ventures are created (Gartner 1988). One of the most dominant research streams in the field of entrepreneurship is the study of antecedents to new venture creation (Reynolds and Miller 1992; Kreuger and Brazeal 1994; Venkataraman 1997). A primary research question in this area has been, ‘What are the characteristics of entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial learning processes that result in more incidents of business start-up efforts?’This chapter is an empirical examination of this topic. The focus of this chapter is the determination of the impact of knowledge flows in entrepreneurship, that is, the combination of general knowledge of the entrepreneur and the influx of new specific knowledge learned during the entrepreneurial process. Framed a bit differently, three specific research questions emerge that guide this investigation (performance in this case is defined as the incidents of new venture creation):
• How does general knowledge possessed by the entrepreneur affect new venture creation?
