Online workshop: Venture Capital and Private Equity in the Asia Pacific Region

(reposted from an email)

INVITATION AND CALL FOR PAPERS

 

Online workshop

 

Venture Capital and Private Equity in the Asia Pacific Region

 

Tues 16 November 

 

9.30am -11am Hong Kong time.

 

Organised by the Asian Finance Association and hosted by the School of Banking and Finance, UNSW.

The Asian Finance Association is pleased to invite interested academics and practitioners to submit papers and/or participate in an online workshop on “Venture Capital and Private Equity in the Asia Pacific Region”

The Asian region has an increasing role in the global venture capital and private equity market. However, there has been little research on the role/impact of venture capital and private equity in the Asia Pacific region. The aim of the workshop is to bring together researchers and market participants to discuss recent research on venture capital and private equity and its broader implications for practice and policy.

We invite authors to submit high-quality research papers on any aspect of venture capital and private equity with a focus on Asia Pacific markets.

Interested authors should e-mail their paper in Acrobat PDF format to:

Contact:       Jo-Ann Suchard
Email:         j.suchard@unsw.edu.au
no later than October 19, 2010.


Cost of participation :
Asian Finance Association members : Free
Non members : US$85 for non members to join the Asian Finance Association and includes subscription to the two journals of the Association : International Review of Finance and Pacific Basin Finance Journal.

Economist Special report on Social Networks (or not)

I took a moment to cruise the pile of Economist issues we have in our lobby and stumbled across a Special Report on Social Networks. Just like I see in many conversations I have with others about my research on networks and entrepreneurship, people are quick to generalize in this order:

• networks --> social networks --> online social networks

Let's be clear here. Networks are a form of organizing that are neither market nor hierarchy. In business research, networks are arguably not a theory, but a way of looking at social structures and processes. There are of course also computer networks, neural networks, infrastructure networks, etc, but those are topics for other blogs. "Social networks" imply network structures of social relationships, for which most people assume it's all about friendship networks, or at least homophily (the degree to which any two people are similar, whether or not they actually know each other). "Social networks" stops there. It does not refer to a medium of communication, or even impute that there is a medium of communication, or communication. Technically, social networks may exist simply by virtue of similar attributes. Realistically, there is communication, including verbal (face-to-face, phone, voip, ..), written, visual, etc. This is where the word "online" often gets dropped. No one says "Do a search for 'social network research' online." It is simply assumed that because so much of what we do is via computers and the internet, that there's no need to state whether it's online or offline. To be clear though, when I read a special report from the Economist on "Social Networks" I was hoping to read about more than facebook and twitter. Sure they play a role in our lives, but so do networks in the real-o-sphere:

James Fowler at Political Networks 2009 from David Lazer on Vimeo.