Abstract
Academic interest in this field was raised by the early success stories of venture-backed companies. However, it took practitioners some time to be convinced that empirical research in this field was worthwhile; Barry (1994, p.11) suggests that research: ‘on VC was virtually nonexistent before the decade of the 1990s … mainly because of lack of data, but some good examples do now exist, and unanswered questions are available in abundance.’ Over recent years, the importance of VC backed companies in employment generation, exports and new product development has led to an explosion of academic activity to tackle these ‘unanswered questions’ (Wright et al., 1999). In this upsurge of research activity, a host of topics have been investigated and this introduction gives the reader a flavour of the breadth of study in this field.
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