Both businesses and recent college graduates in the United States attribute the lack of soft skills in recent college graduates to the colleges' inability to prepare students for the workforce. This article explores the literature on social capital, human capital and social learning theory, offering an alternative hypothesis for why recent…

Curley and Formica's (2008, 2010) studies of high-expectation entrepreneurship focus on the role of "experimental laboratories" in promoting the start-up and successful development of high-expectation firms. Although it is not difficult to understand the potential usefulness of these experimental labs--business simulators in which skilled partners…

This paper provides insights into the human capital development of a group of young entrepreneurs, all of whom have built growth businesses with turnovers of between 1M British Pounds and 90M British Pounds. Their development of knowledge and skills was investigated before and during the creation of their first main ventures. This is significant…

Most UK Regional Development Agencies (RDAs) have committed themselves to developing an Enterprise Strategy for their region. This commitment is mainly in response to the current Labour government's keenness to see enterprise and entrepreneurship at the centre of any economic development agenda. Pro-entrepreneurship policies have been embraced as…

Industrial culture focuses mainly on the production of "things"--of static objects. Knowledge, on the other hand, is constantly in flux, like a flowing stream. Conventional industrial notions lead policy makers to believe that the addition of a knowledge-based industry to an existing industrial base makes a knowledge economy. This is not the case.…