Portfolio Entrepreneurship in Slovakia - Empirical Analysis of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises

Business in the beginning of the 21-st century faces very turbulent times as the developments on the debt-crises have threatened the European market. These turbulent times are characterized by doubts on financial markets, the rising of state taxes and inflation, which turns also in difficulties for small and medium sized enterprises. Especially the group of small and medium sized enterprises, which cannot benefit from economies of scale and scope and other advantages, are threatened the most. It requires special alertness in spotting ideas and to combine resources to overcome this entrepreneurial disaster crossing Europe. Especially for small export-oriented countries like Slovakia, which depends on foreign trade, must handle this situations very patient and carefully in order to protect their own small and medium sized enterprises and thus its employment rate. [ ] Accordingly this thesis represents a complex view about portfolio entrepreneurs with special focus on a region of the Slovak Republic, which is the country of analysis. It delivers new insights about the personality and abilities, capabilities, skills and traits of portfolio entrepreneurs. Thus delivers a special significance for the development of portfolio entrepreneurship, which is derived from the entrepreneurship research. Furthermore this diploma thesis represents a kind of forerunner in this research area for the Slovak Republic as no comparable research done on this theme could be researched during the conducting of the analysis. §The reader will have the chance to find out valuable information about the state of the art literature contributed by other authors in the theoretical part of this thesis. This literature research has been developed from English speaking literature and is notified at the end of the diploma thesis, what makes it affordable for subsequent studies. Subsequently, the results of this study, which has been built on the grounds of extensive literature review, will be presented in the results part. These results have been obtained by a series of in-depth interviews with researched successful portfolio entrepreneurs. In consequence the results come up with new, until now not researched results presented in a very user friendly kind, enriched by citations of portfolio entrepreneurs, expressed during the in-depth interview. [ ]