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Financing With Venture Capital: Advances in Knowledge Over the Last Ten Years and Research Avenues

2. Methodology

2.1 Scientific writing, scientific events and identification of experts and centres of expertise in venture capital

To identify the documents that are pertinent to the review of literature on venture capital, we consulted various sources of information:

• databases of the customary periodicals, namely ABI-INFORM, EMERALD, SOURCE and JSTOR;
• sites of international bodies that are responsible for scientific congresses on SMEs such as ICSB (International Council of Small Business), Babson and CIFPME (Congrès International Francophone de la PME);
• university centres or public bodies that are likely to produce related research reports such as the INRPME (Institut de recherche sur la PME), Industry Canada (Strategis), Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, OECD, SBA (Small Business Administration of the United States), the Bank of Canada, Statistics Canada, the Canadian Department of Finance.
• Moreover, the reading of certain documents and the consultation of sources that were initially planned led to other pertinent sources, the largest of which is the SSRN (Social Science Research Network), which is an inventory of the research conducted in the fields of finance, accounting, economics, law, marketing and negotiation. The documents are submitted by the researchers themselves, which can lead to problems of duplication. In fact, one can find both research papers and the same texts published in official periodicals, which we corrected.

In spite of rigorous data collection, it is obvious that our research cannot be exhaustive since all these documents, and especially those that are not distributed to the public, are not easy to identify or to locate, and several important Internet sites are not updated regularly. Moreover, as the bibliographic research was done using key words, it is possible that certain documents that had been classified incorrectly escaped us. Lastly, the limited access to certain electronic periodicals or to specific sites precluded our getting complete documents. However, this should not significantly affect our conclusions and recommendations.

The following key words were used in the academic research: venture capital, capital de risque, financement, private equity, portfolio investment, development stages enterprises, venture capital companies, investors, trends, non-profit organizations, community development, funds, investment policy, financial performance, organization development, processus décisionnel, exit, convertible securities, IPO, start-up, valeur ajoutée, disbursements, fundraising, performance and entrepreneurs.

Other than specific information that allowed the classification of documents by subject, author and year, the abstracts were read to extract the following information: type of study (empirical [with hypotheses], descriptive, theoretical or professional [with statistics without hypotheses]), period covered by the study, provenance of the sample (case, survey, interview, panel), sectors covered by the sample, method used to collect the information (questionnaire, database, public documents such as prospectuses), the primary hypotheses or research objectives and last, the main results.

When we had access to documents, we read a little more in depth to complete our list of information. On the other hand, this could not be done for a large number of references. The missing information is related more to the sample and research methodology. In all cases, we were able to compile the hypotheses or research objectives and the main results. Lastly, reading this information allowed us to classify one text under several research subjects, which explains that the number of times a subject is raised, which we have called an "occurrence", is greater than the number of documents that were consulted. Thus, the 313 documents that were noted represent 564 occurrences, an average of two subjects per document.

Given the amount of literature available, we limited ourselves to the last ten years of scientific writing and to seven years for events of the same type.

2.2 Professional information, professional events and industry trends

Apart from inventorying scientific and professional writings, we have compiled information on professional associations and events (conferences, fora, etc.). To do this, we conducted the research by Internet using the following main search engines: Google.com, Yahoo.com, Lycos.com, Altavista.com, Excite.com, GO.com, WebCrawler.com, NorthernLight.com, Dogpile.com, Metacrawler.com, voila.fr and help-finance.com.

In addition, the following key words were used for:

associations:
association of venture capital, association of the investors, association of joint venture, associations de capital de risque, associations des investisseurs;

conferences:
venture capital investment, conférence sur le capital de risque, colloque sur le capital de risque, congrès sur l'industrie du capital de risque, annual symposium of venture capital, forum for private equity, annual private equity, private equity financing, annual conference, venture capital conferences, symposium sur le capital de risque, investment capital conference, venture fair, conférences sur le financement, annual venture capital conference, venture capital financing, financement par capital de risque, sources of financing, financement privé, international venture capital summit, financing forum, conference on investment capital, investors conference, meeting of venture capital, venture capital annual forum.

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