Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to argue that defining, measuring and developing skills are crucial to successful entrepreneurship and that being able to do so can help to build strong rural entrepreneurial ecosystems. Design/methodology/approach: The literature on entrepreneurship...

This paper investigates the early development of English cotton spinning by analyzing about 700 bankruptcies and 1300 dissolutions of partnership reported in the London Gazette, 1770-1840. The data show two temporal cycles, peaking in the early to mid-1800s and in the later 1820s, near the ends...