Understanding the Trends of European Startup Ecosystems

The world faces numerous crises, being the economic and financial crisis, the more worrying crisis and which people become more aware, to find solutions to various problems, namely unemployment, especially youth unemployment. Throughout the evolution of the world, entrepreneurship phenomenon went hand in hand with economic and technological development, providing new businesses with innovative concepts, responding to people's needs. Today, entrepreneurship continues to be important to the economies, as it adds new companies with value by presenting people with talent, with creative sense and innovative products and services. With technological development and financial assistance from investors or government, we have witnessed an exponential growth of startups over the past few years. Entrepreneurial education also encouraged this development, presenting conferences and workshops, calling students to innovation, creating your own startup. In reply to the growth and development of European ecosystems, this research work was developed to analyze the reality of European ecosystems. The aim is to understand whether there are trends in choosing economic sectors, business models and pricing models. This investigation is composed by an extensive literature review to startups and startup ecosystem and by an empirical study to startups’ perception concerning to this subject. To acquire empirical data it was conducted an online questionnaire directed to a sample of startups registered on online platform. This study confirmed the existence of trends by information gathered from online platform and the online questionnaire. It is proposed a recommendation, which will help to continue the investigations concerning to this subject

An updated systematic review of business accelerators : functions, operation, and gaps in the existing literature

Business accelerators have emerged as an important innovation intermediary, with their primary role identified as stimulating premature startups through mentorship and training programs. However, despite significant improvement and 17 years of working history, there are still gaps in working behavior, business accelerator forms, organizational structure, operations, and outcomes. This systematic review aims to boost the understanding of seed accelerators in innovation and entrepreneurial activities. The Context, Intervention, Mechanism, and Outcome (CIMO) framework was used to collect data from the 53 articles published in the last 17 years. In this current systematic review of applying a CIMO analysis to business accelerators, we retrieved 53 articles for further detailed studies, out of which 21 articles were assessed for the risk of bias analysis. The current review highlights that by providing learning opportunities, idea validation, increased access to growth, and innovation, startup accelerators achieved their goals. Moreover, the study also identified gaps in the literature and opportunities for cohort-based, short-term mentorship programs. The outcomes of the present study will provide suggestions for policymakers, entrepreneurs, managers, and investors

Mind the Gales:An attention-based view of startup investment arms

This dissertation takes the corporate perspective, and seeks to understand inconsistencies in decision making enacted by corporate venture capital (CVC) investment units. CVC units are often portrayed as rational instruments deployed to obtain corporate innovation and to achieve renewal goals, by gaining privileged access to external startups’ knowledge resources. However, the dissertation proposes a behavioral framework, based on the attention-based view, that demonstrates how the selective attention of CVC units subsequently affects the availability of particular organizational moves. This implies that certain issues and answers are (deliberately or non-deliberately) attended to, while others are ignored. Patterns of selective attention in conjunction with sequential decision-making processes signify that future decisions or organizational moves are highly dependent on the attentional structures of prior decisions. The first study of the dissertation explains why the observed variance in a CVC unit’s selective focus of attention (measured as variance in evaluation durations) results from the unit’s interpretation of a corporate firm’s renewal goals. The second study explains how a CVC unit’s investment behavior can slow down (measured as the number of investments), no matter how many prospective external opportunities are scouted through syndication networks. Finally, the third study explains how CVC units differ in their abilities to transfer and integrate external knowledge embedded in their CVC portfolios. Altogether, the dissertation highlights behavioral characteristics of corporate innovation, and in particular, how CVC units’ selective focus of attention is conditioned by social and emergent factors that in turn shape the particular set of opportunities that a corporate firm can use in pursuit of innovation and strategic renewal

The role of cooperation breadth as a strategy for innovation: a study of openness in Spanish startups

Tesis de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Empresariales, Departamento de Organización de Empresas, leída el 29-01-2017Las startups y empresas establecidas juegan papeles muy importantes en la generación de innovaciones y crecimiento económico, pero contribuyen al ecosistema de innovación y desarrollo económico de modos diferentes. Entre las estrategias de innovación, la innovación abierta está tomando una mayor importancia para ambas, startups y empresas establecidas. La literatura afirma que los recursos y capacidades de las startups son distintos de los de las empresas establecidas, así que podrían existir diferencias en el uso de las estrategias de innovación abierta. En este contexto, esta tesis adopta una combinación de perspectivas teóricas (perspectiva de recursos y capacidades, con especial atención a los derechos de propiedad intelectual, la perspectiva basada en el conocimiento, y la perspectiva de capacidades dinámicas) para desarrollar una mejor comprensión de la innovación abierta en las startups. Yo investigo cómo la diversidad de fuentes externas de conocimiento contribuye al resultado de innovación de las startups. Para responder a esta pregunta de investigación general, presento separados, cuatro estudios empíricos que dirigen varias facetas de la creación y captura de valor en la innovación abierta, con especial énfasis en las startups...Startups and incumbent firms both play important roles in generating innovations and economic growth, but they contribute to the innovation ecosystem and economic development in different ways. Between the innovation strategies, open innovation is taking a higher importance for both incumbent firms and startups. Literature states that startups’ resources and capacities are different from incumbent firms, so there might exist differences on the use of open innovation strategies. In this context, this dissertation adopts a combination of theoretical perspectives (the resource-based view, with especial attention to intellectual propriety rights, the knowledge-based view, and the dynamic capabilities perspective) in order to develop a better understanding of open innovation in startups. I investigate how the diversity of external knowledge sources contributes to startups’ innovation performance. In addressing this overarching research question, I present four separate empirical studies that deal with various facets of value creation and value capture from open innovation, with a special emphasis on startups...Depto. de Organización de EmpresasFac. de Ciencias Económicas y EmpresarialesTRUEunpu

The Effectiveness of Active Labour Market Policies in Reducing Unemployment in Transition Economies

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the effectiveness of Active Labour Market Policies (ALMP) in reducing unemployment in European transition and non-transition economies. The theoretical framework proposed to analyse the effectiveness of ALMPs in reducing unemployment indicates that these policies affect unemployment through several different mechanisms. ALMPs can facilitate the matching process, increase productivity, increase labour supply and competition in the labour market, reduce welfare losses of the unemployed and serve as a stimulus to unemployed individuals‘ willingness to work. This research is based on both a country-level analysis using a sample of European transition and non-transition economies (for 2005-2015) and individual-level analysis using cross-sectional data (2012) for Kosovo. The country-level analysis assesses the ALMP effectiveness using two different strategies. The first one investigates the effect of ALMP expenditure (as share of GDP) on the flow from unemployment to employment using a Fixed-Effects panel model and finds a positive effect, in line with expectations. The economic significance of this finding, however, is questionable since the increase in the outflow from unemployment is relatively small. The second strategy investigates whether the ALMP expenditure (as share of GDP) reduces the unemployment rate in a dynamic panel analysis, using a Generalised Methods of Moments (GMM) estimator. This strategy, also, investigates the relative effectiveness of different measures by separately including variables to account for: Training, Employment Incentives, Supported Employment and Rehabilitation, Direct Job Creation and Start-Up Incentives. The results from the second approach find no significant effect of any of the ALMPs in reducing the unemployment rate. The analysis of the ALMP effectiveness at the individual level in Kosovo explores the following measures: On the Job Training, Internship Scheme and Institution and Enterprise Training. This analysis focuses on the following outcomes: beneficiaries‘ probability of finding a job post-participation; beneficiaries‘ probability of increasing job search and beneficiaries‘ probability of having an employment contract. The empirical findings indicate that participation in one of these active measures is associated with a higher individual‘s probability of being employed compared to a non-participant, however the results differ subject to model specification. In addition, the findings also suggest that among employed individuals those that participated in ALMPs are more likely to be in informal employment. Finally, an assessment of the policy implications for European economies seeking to increase and sustain employment through active measures is provided based on the empirical evidence presented in this thesi