Business Angel Networks and the Development of the Informal Venture Capital Market in the U.K.: Is There Still a Role for the Public Sector?

Colin M Mason and Richard T Harrison

Small Business Economics, 1997, vol. 9, issue 2, 23 pages

Abstract: Business angel networks (BANs) provide a channel of communication between private venture capital investors (business angels) and entrepreneurs seeking risk capital. Most operate locally on a not-for-profit basis with their costs underwritten by the public sector. However, the recent establishment of BANs by private sector organisations in the U.K. has led to a questioning of the government's continuing role in the financing of BANs. This paper demonstrates that there are significant differences between public sector and other not-for-profit BANs and private sector, commercially-oriented BANs in terms of the investments that they facilitate. Private sector BANs are primarily involved with larger, later stage deals whereas investments made through not-for-profit BANs are generally smaller, involve start-ups and other early stage businesses and are local. The emergence of private sector BANs has therefore not eliminated the need for public sector support for locally-oriented networks. Copyright 1997 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0921-898X/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:sbusec:v:9:y:1997:i:2:p:111-23

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().