Who Are User Entrepreneurs? Findings on Innovation, Founder Characteristics, and Firm Characteristics

Documents the prevalence of innovators who create products or services for their own use then start firms, by industry and type. Examines founder and firm characteristics, revenue growth, job creation, R&D investment, and intellectual property creation

Toward a process theory of entrepreneurship: revisiting opportunity identification and entrepreneurial actions

This dissertation studies the early development of new ventures and small business and the entrepreneurship process from initial ideas to viable ventures. I unpack the micro-foundations of entrepreneurial actions and new ventures’ investor communications through quality signals to finance their growth path. This dissertation includes two qualitative papers and one quantitative study. The qualitative papers employ an inductive multiple-case approach and include seven medical equipment manufacturers (new ventures) in a nascent market context (the mobile health industry) across six U.S. states and a secondary data analysis to understand the emergence of opportunities and the early development of new ventures. The quantitative research chapter includes 770 IPOs in the manufacturing industries in the U.S. and investigates the legitimation strategies of young ventures to gain resources from targeted resource-holders.Open Acces

The Restructuring of Technological Capabilities through Corporate Expansion

This paper analyses the restructuring of technological capabilities following M&A-based growth in large industrial firms with a substantial technological knowledge base. In particular, we focus on the restructuring of those technological capabilities that are of a general purpose kind (namely ICT) or related to the core capabilities of a firm. We develop and test a conceptual framework grounded on a co-evolutionary view, that relates the motivations and environment for corporate expansion to the firm-specific pattern of restructuring in the composition of corporate technological capabilities. We find that distinct patterns of technological capability restructuring are associated with each combination of the motivations and environment for firm growth. In particular, inter-industry contexts reduce technological relatedness in market motivated expansions, while relatedness has also declined in more recent technology-motivated growth in general. The acquisition of ICT is common as well to both technology-motivated inter-industry deals and more recent market-motivated deals. However, we speculate that any similarities in the outcomes of these alternative motives for firm growth arise for quite different purposes.

The Governance of Knowledge in Academic Spin-Offs. The Case of Emilia-Romagna.

The phenomenon of academic spin-offs (ASOs) has been widely studied in recent times. Scholars have mainly concentrated on identifying the factors that favours the phenomenon and the incentive alignments of the parties involved in the process. These works tend to remain static in nature by solely investigating the ex ante determinants of the process, that is the elements that favoured a context to be more profitable than others, usually in terms of the number of ASOs generated. More recently scholars have also acknowledged that ASOs are heterogeneous firms and have started investigating the development process of such firms. It has been highlighted that ASOs need to overcome certain defined stage of growth in order to become established firms in the market. Our work continues this line of investigation and aims to gives evidence that the paths of ASO development are heterogeneous themselves. We investigate the flows of knowledge taking place within and across the firm in a dynamic manner, at various stage of the development process of the firm: we study the governance of knowledge in a sub-population of ASOs and give evidence of the variety of possible ways the firm can develop.governance of knowledge; academic spin-off; theory of the firm; technology development

New Knowledge for Old Regions? The Case of the Software Park Hagenberg in the Traditional Industrial Region of Upper Austria

This paper seeks to enhance our understanding about the opportunities and limits of new path creation in traditional regional innovation systems. Due to their inherited historical legacies, such systems are usually thought of being ill-equipped to give rise to high-tech or knowledge intensive activities. Departing from recent insights on research concerned with the transformation of innovation systems and evolutionary economic geography we identify in a conceptual way enabling and constraining factors for the rise of new development paths in traditional regions. Empirically, we focus on the case of the “Software Park Hagenberg†(SPH) located in the old industrial region of Upper Austria. We examine key events triggering the emergence and subsequent evolution of the SPH and explore the role of the RIS in shaping the development trajectory of the SPH. Moreover, applying social network analysis tools, we investigate the pattern of networking between firms, research organisations and educational bodies within the SPH and we provide some evidence on the diffusion of knowledge and innovation generated though these interactions throughout the regional economy.

Entrepreneurship, Entry and Exit in Creative Industries: an explorative Survey

Series: Creative Industries in Vienna: Development, Dynamics and Potential

Survey of the literature on innovation and economic performance

Despite very strong differences in their treatment of technological change in economic theory, both the neoclassical and the more Schumpetarian (and evolutionary) economic approaches often assume that market selection rewards the most innovative firms. However, despite such strong assumptions, empirical evidence on whether innovative firms perform better than non-innovative firms remains inconclusive. If innovators do not grow more, does this imply that market selection fails? And does the different impact of innovation on industrial performance (measured by firm growth and profitability) and financial performance (measured by market value and stock returns) signal differences in how industrial and financial markets react to firm level efforts around innovation? This discussion paper reviews the literature on the interaction between innovation and economic/financial performance, and outlines the way that work within FINNOV Work Package 2 (SELECTION), Co-Evolution of Industry Dynamics and Financial Dynamics, will contribute to better understanding this interaction

Organizational paths of commercializing patented inventions: The effects of transaction costs, firm capabilities, and collaborative ties

This study examines the factors affecting modes of commercializing patented inventions using a novel dataset based on a survey of U.S. inventors. We find that technological uncertainty and possessing complementary assets raise the propensity for internal commercialization. We find that R&D collaboration with firms in a horizontal relationship is likely to increase the propensity to license the invention. In addition, the paper shows that macro-level environment conditions that affect exchange conditions, such as technology familiarity, influence the effects of capabilities on governance choice.transaction cost economics; knowledge-based view; collaboration ties; commercialization; innovation; patent

Communities, Knowledge, and Innovation: Indian Immigrants in the US Semiconductor Industry

This paper investigates the influence of technological, geographic, and ethnic communities on the innovativeness of Indian inventors. We study Indian inventors in the semiconductor industry in the US and examine their patenting profiles between 1975 and 1999 to identify the influences on the quantity and quality of their innovations. We find that inventors who rely on knowledge from technological and geographic communities enhance their innovativeness. Knowledge from the ethnic Indian community is related to inventor innovativeness in the form of an inverted U. The negative effect of knowledge gained from the ethnic community on innovativeness is pronounced for experienced inventors.innovation, knowledge, semiconductor industry