Economic principles don’t just apply to Silicon Valley startups and Fortune 500 companies, says Stanford Graduate School of Business professor and economist Paul Oyer. Over the last several years, he and two economist colleagues — Mike Mazzeo from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management and Scott Schaefer from the University of Utah — traveled the country to learn from and about America's small businesses.

The result: Their book, Roadside MBA; a blog; and a Stanford Business multimedia presentation in which the three professors meet with company owners in the American West to find out what's working for them and what's not.

Watch the preview below — or join them on a road trip that took them from Stanford through California's Central Valley and the Arizona desert and then on to Las Vegas.