PER-ANDERS HAVNES (Agder Research, Norway) LINE MARIE B SKJEKKELAND (Agder Research, Norway)
Abstract
The manifestation of entrepreneurship is new business ventures that may be organised within or outside existing firms. Governments in all countries in the industrial world attempt to encourage entrepreneurship as an instrument to renew and strengthen their economy. Many of these governments evaluate their policies by monitoring results of the programmes.This paper examines the evaluation of an ongoing entrepreneurial support programme in Norway. The evaluation of the programme demonstrates that inconsistent and ambiguous goals complicate the measurements that are required for the evaluation. Further complications arise from the fact that some goals are specified in quantitative, others in qualitative terms. Finally, the evaluation draws attention to the significance of the incubation period between cause and effect.Such problems indicate that however precise quantitative measures appear to be when presented in statistical table or graphs, caution is necessary when the measurements are used to assess the effects of programmes and activities.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.