Key Words: National entrepreneurial activity summary, participation, motivation, innovation, growth, finance, entrepreneurial capacity, Australian data profile

Aim of this paper: To portray a summary of national entrepreneurial activity in Australia within the limits prescribed by the data available in the 2006 GEM Australia national adult population survey.

OVERVIEW OF THE 2006 FINDINGS

The National Adult Population Survey for the GEM Australia project is the primary source of data used to monitor entrepreneurial activity in the nation. The Australian GEM team adopts an approach to portraying ‘entrepreneurial activity’, as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon, involving six elemental components: participation, motivation, innovation, growth orientation, finance, and entrepreneurial capacity. Readers can find more information on this approach at the GEM Australia website (www.gemaustralia.com.au) and in the article: Hindle, Kevin 2006. A Measurement Framework for International Entrepreneurship Policy Research: from Impossible Index to Malleable Matrix. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Vol. 3, No. 2, 139-182. In this summary report, we present a highly compressed profile of the data collected in 2006.

For each of the six areas of national entrepreneurial activity, Table 1 includes broad comments relevant to the 2006 data and trends that have emerged over the seven-year life of the project. Following table 1, we detail some aspects of the methodology employed in the 2006 survey.

Table 1 – Summary of key observations and trends

SURVEY PROCEDURE IN 2006

The GEM global executive policy for each country’s national population survey specifies that data must be collected from a stratified random sample of a minimum of 2000 respondents.  In Australia, the sample is randomly selected from the national White Pages telephone directory and is subsequently weighted to reflect the national demographic and gender distribution within the GEM definition of ‘working age’: adults between the ages of 18 and 64 years. Full details of the methodology employed by GEM Australia can be found on the GEM Australia website (www.gemaustralia.com.au) under the heading ‘How GEM works’.

Some particularly salient aspects of the 2006 survey are summarised below.
In 2006 over-sampling of certain states was carried out (ACT, NT, SA, TAS) in order to provide sufficient respondents to permit analysis of regional differences on certain measures of entrepreneurial activity. Table 2 shows the distribution of respondents from whom data was collected in the 2006 Australian survey. .

Table 2 – Distribution of respondents

A summary of selected data categories collected in calendar year 2006 is shown in Table 3 below. The unweighted sample size was 2,518. In order to facilitate the standard national monitor the raw number responses were weighted as described previously. This reduced this year’s weighted sample size to 1971, primarily by adjusting for gender bias, excluding respondents above or below working age and adjusting for the over-sample. The weighted sample was used to form percentages of the total population participating in various types of entrepreneurial activity, while the unweighted sample were used in any statistical analysis techniques in order to maintain integrity among the findings.

Table 3 – Summary of the 2006 Data


[1] Readers should be aware that the Global Executive team and other countries use different terms to describe these business stages in their respective reports. Please refer to GEM Global Research Methodology section for a description of these differences.