New Technology-Based Firms in the 1990s

This is the fourth volume in an annual series originating from the High Technology Small Firms Conference, which has been held at Manchester Business School in England since 1993. However, this volume marks a departure for the conference by reflecting a new collaboration between Manchester Business School and the University of Twente at Enschede in The Netherlands. In the future the conference will alternate between Enschede and Manchester. The papers included in this volume represent the best papers presented at the first conference to be held at the University of Twente in September 1996.

The broad intention in initiating this international collaboration was to increase the number of contributions to this conference from continental Europe, and this has certainly been achieved in the current volume, with inputs from Sweden, The Netherlands, Germany, Portugal, Denmark, Finland and France, together with the usual strong United Kingdom contribution. The call for papers that engendered this fourth conference had a specific theme of entrepreneurial activity and the co-operation process, with particular concern for networking. In keeping with the goal of previous books in this series, this set of papers adds to a growing body of evolving specialist literature on high technology small firms.