Entrepreneurial success : A comparative approach on German and Swedish entrepreneurs during the nineteenth and twentieth century

Abstract: This paper examines the similarities and differences between German and Swedish entrepreneurs born in the nineteenth and twentieth century. It is a replicated study by Vasta et al. (2015). The study is a part of an international project, where the characteristics of entrepreneurs’ is reviewed in multiple countries. The information of entrepreneurs is collected from biographical dictionaries and the qualitative data is later on converted into quantitative data, where several different variables are measured. The applied method, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) generated three different dimensions of entrepreneurial success. The components are the following: celebrity (captures entrepreneurs’ visibility in the various sources), economic success (describes the economic performance of an entrepreneur) and social mobility (measures entrepreneurs’ social class improvement). By using a prosopographical approach, we found among other things that a level of innovation intensity is required in order to reach a higher level of economic success for both German and Swedish entrepreneurs. Keywords: Germany, Sweden, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, economic business history, founder, inventor