IDENTIFYING THE STRUCTURE OF RESEARCH FIELDS ON VENTURE

摘要

"Venture businesses," "start-ups," or and "entrepreneurs" bring many social and economic benefits. They promote innovation, boost the national economy, and create employment. Universities and research institutes are expected to foster human resources such as entrepreneurs to create the seeds of venture businesses. They also play an important role in the venture ecosystem by industry-government-academia cooperation. However, due to the rapidly increasing numbers of academic research papers on venture businesses, and the lack of a research overview, it is difficult to understand the whole structure of this field. This research overviews the studies on venture companies, reveals the emerging fields, and indicates the current state of venture research in Japan. We extracted academic papers including the words "venture," "start-up," or "entrepreneur" in the titles and abstracts from the Web of Science provided by Thomson Reuter's with data from 1900 to 2014. Then we conducted citation analysis for these papers using network analysis. With these search queries we extracted 67,130 papers. In addition, we specified five main clusters and fifteen sub-clusters (including 17,480 papers). From the result of analysis by country, we figured out that the share of Japanese papers was only about 1% in the data set. Also, through the time-series analysis, we identified young and growing research topics containing the keywords "internationalization," "born global," "institutional entrepreneur," and "political corruption" in particular. In these fields, Japanese papers have a slight 0.2% share. Japan should invest human resources, goods, money, and information into the topics that are growing in this research field. We believe excellent researches will make policies more effective, increase the benefits through business, and contribute to the development of the Japanese and global economies.