A spirit of entrepreneurship encompassed the conception and birth of this volume because it addresses a new, and critically important, subject area. The marketing discipline has until recently largely ignored entrepreneurship and new ventures. The growing entrepreneurship field has also devoted little attention to marketing. This is the first scholarly book to discuss and conceptualize the interface between marketing and entrepreneurship and to provide numerous research opportunities on truly important issues. At a time when the marketing discipline is increasingly criticized for too little attention to important topics, this book offers a path for the researcher who wants to make a major impact. This is a pioneering book and it is hoped that it will one day be viewed as a classic contribution to marketing and to entrepreneurship thought. Although there is considerable new knowledge in this volume, the primary focus is on questions, issues and variables that should stimulate added creativity. For the scholar, the sifting and sorting will be fruitful. The contents of this volume will be of value to the reader in search of ideas, concepts and research directions pertaining to marketing in new and/or growing ventures. The authors are leading scholars in the marketing and management disciplines.

The book begins with a rich collection of five articles on the nature of entrepreneurship and its relationship to marketing. This may be the single best array of definitional perspectives ever written, in part because leading contributors to the debate have returned to the task. The second section focuses on market opportunity, but rather than only looking at market analysis and idea screening, there is also ground breaking work regarding entrepreneurial opportunity identification and opportunity recognition. Marketing strategy and each of the marketing mix areas are addressed in separate chapters with particular attention to the uniquenesses of marketing in new enterprises as compared to mature, larger firms. The final section of the book may be the most intriguing, with attention to entrepreneurship in international markets and lesser developed countries, as well as the role of new and smaller enterprises in job generation. The audiences for this book include marketing, management and entrepreneurship professors, PhD candidates, public policy makers, intellectually curious business owners and others.

GERALD E. HILLS is the Denton Thorne Chairholder in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Marketing at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has authored and edited ten books and more than 70 articles in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Business Venturing, Business Horizons, International Journal of Small Business, Journal of Technological and Social Change, and the Journal of Small Business Management. As Vice-President, he heads the professors' division of the American Marketing Association and has also served as President of the U.S. Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship and the International Council for Small Business.