Nascent entrepreneurs are people who are (alone or with others) actively engaged in creating a new venture, and who expect to be the owner or part owner of this start-up. Recently, an increasing number of empirical studies deals with the impacts of start-up activities on economic development of nations (Wong, Ho and Autio forthcoming; van Stel, Carree and Thurik forthcoming) and subnational regions (Acs and Armington, 2004; Fritsch and Mueller, 2004). Obviously different types of entrepreneurial activities may have different impacts on economic growth. Especially high growth potential entrepreneurship is found to have a significant (positive) impact on the dependent variables of economic growth in economically advanced countries. Given that newly founded firms are important for the economic development of nations and regions, and that nascent entrepreneurs are by definition important for the foundation of new firms, information about nascent entrepreneurs is important for understanding crucial aspects of the economy. This information, however, can not be found in publications from official statistics. Until the turn of the millennium, therefore, we knew next to nothing about nascent entrepreneurs in Germany. The situation improved considerably when results from the first German wave of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) survey became available in 19991. The GEM project, however, is focused on variations of entrepreneurial activity between entire countries. The relevance of detailed information on nascent entrepreneurs at the regional level, and the lack of it for Germany, led us to start the research project Regional Entrepreneurship Monitor (REM) Germany in 2000. As part of this project, we performed a representative survey of the adult population in ten German regions, plus a survey and interviews with local experts in the field of entrepreneurship. A second wave followed in 2003. This paper summarizes our findings using data from these surveys and interviews.