Entrepreneurship is recognized as important for growth. European policies to facilitate entrepreneurship, however, have been less successful than expected and the EU continues to lag other advanced economies. This may reflect an incomplete understanding of the underlying processes affecting firm creation. The incoming fellow will enhance the potential for identifying economic and social factors associated with the creation and survival of new firms. While the primary context will be the UK, elements of the project will involve other EU countries. The focus--the micro foundations of entrepreneurial development--will be on the interaction of entrepreneurial characteristics, ambitions, business strategies, and environmental factors, including policies, institutions and social context.Aston Business School (ABS) excels in economic aspects of entrepreneurship research, and will benefit from synergies drawing upon the incoming fellow’s background in sociology and management research. ABS has been a key player in the major international entrepreneurial research programme, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The incoming fellow was not only the founding principle investigator of GEM, but also had a central role in developing longitudinal studies of the entrepreneurial process; Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED) have been implemented in nine countries.The methodological expertise of the incoming fellow will facilitate expanding the GEM programme with a complementary longitudinal study, a UK–PSED. This will provide more precise information about factors preceding and accompanying the birth and growth of firms and will form the basis for improved theoretical analysis and fact-based policy recommendations around four specific research issues: the role of local social capital in entrepreneurship, informal versus formal businesses, commercial versus social objectives of entrepreneurs, and the successful transitions of start-ups to profitable new firms.