If you're curious about starting your own business, or hoping to improve your own entrepreneurial skills, why not try our suggestions for further reading?

Books

To find out more about the entrepreneur and the forces of change:
Entrepreneurship: Globalization, Innovation and Development
Elizabeth Chell (Thomson Learning, published 2001)

If you want to find out more about entrepreneurship and successful small businesses:
Understanding Enterprise, Entrepreneurship and Small Business
Simon Bridge, Ken O’Neill and Stan Comie (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003)

To find out more about starting a successful entrepreneurial business:
Entrepreneurship and Small Business
Paul Burns (Palgrave, 2001)

If you already have a business but want to make it more entrepreneurial and have a stronger impact on your local economy:
The Essential Guide to Managing Small Business Growth
Peter Wilson and Susan Bates (Wiley, 2003)

For information about management concepts, tools and techniques in a digestible format:
The Manager’s Good Study Guide
Sheila Tyler (The Open University, 2004)
This handy reference manual contains a compendium of management ideas covering strategy, marketing, finance, leadership, managing people and monitoring and evaluation. For added value, it takes you through the construction of logical and persuasive arguments, writing fluently and forcefully, researching and using information, and handling numbers and using graphs and diagrams with confidence.

>Weblinks

If you want to see if your business idea is viable, why not try Venture Navigator? It'll evaluate your plan, and put you in touch with resources and like-minded people to shape your next step.

Need to get your finances straight? One Life on money from Radio One has everything you need to know from tax tips to downsizing debts

To see what help the government may offer to people trying to set up a new firm, including the contact details of local Business Links, visit the Small Business Service.

If you are interested in getting help in talking through your idea or in starting a small firm there are a number of sites. The first step may be your local enterprise agency, which you can find through the National Federation of Enterprise Agencies.

For younger would-be entrepreneurs the Prince's Trust or Shell’s Livewire programme can be very useful.

For links to entrepreneurship sites, research and news visit the Small Business Portal.

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Content last updated: 26/05/2005

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