Small Business Economics最新文献

Whilst the literature on entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) predominantly concentrates on endogenously developed systems of entrepreneurial actors, this paper investigates the atypical emergence of EEs initiated by inward foreign direct investment (FDI). In these more deviant cases, international connectivity and public policy initiative are rooted in the ecosystem from the outset, but their interdependence has received only limited attention to date. This gap led to our research question: how does the interplay between public institutional support and international connectivity facilitate the emergence and growth of an entrepreneurial ecosystem in a ‘desert of knowledge’? An empirical analysis is undertaken on the development of the Medical Technology sector in two locations — Costa Rica Central Valley and the West of Ireland — where inward FDI from public policy initiative was the trigger for the genesis and subsequent growth of the sector in both regions. Despite having similar starting points, an entrepreneurial ecosystem has developed in one location (West of Ireland), whilst the other (Costa Rica Central Valley) has fallen short to date. By undertaking a comparative analysis, the main finding reveals that public institutional support must promote the local development of knowledge capabilities to absorb knowledge from abroad (outside-in) and transform knowledge to serve an international market through domestic new entrepreneurial firms and FDI (inside-out). The evolving nature, timing, and quality of public institutional support and international connectivity matters in hindering or promoting an EE from FDI.

We investigate the international network activity of entrepreneurial firms and its implications for the territorial boundaries of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Integrating the idea that territory and networks are distinct structures that can overlap with prior work suggesting that interorganizational networks formed by entrepreneurial firms pursuing opportunities transcend geographic boundaries, we focus on the antecedents to the international network activity of entrepreneurial firms in entrepreneurial ecosystems. We study how entrepreneurial ecosystem conditions, network embeddedness, and speed of firm growth influence the international network activity of 290 dedicated biotech firms located in four regional entrepreneurial ecosystems in Sweden over a period of 10 years. Descriptive data analyses reveal that the interorganizational networks created by the firms in our sample span territorial boundaries with more than half of all network activity involving a partner located in a foreign country. The results of a series of panel regression analyses further indicate that the conditions in the regional entrepreneurial ecosystems and firm characteristics influence the extent of international network activity. Through our work, we add to the scholarly understanding of the complex geography of entrepreneurial ecosystems. Our research highlights that the network activity of entrepreneurial firms oftentimes spans the territorial boundaries of entrepreneurial ecosystems and suggests that thinking outside the box of traditional predetermined administrative or political boundaries may inform more effective policy.

Public procurement can be defined as the process by which public contracting authorities purchase goods, services, and works from private suppliers, including small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The access of SMEs to public contracts is one of the objectives of public procurement policies, as they suffer from complex procedures and high transaction costs. At the same time, public procurement is increasingly being used as an instrument for environmental policies, through green clauses (i.e., mandatory specifications in the contract performance) and award criteria (i.e., the dimensions of the offers the contracting authority assesses). The objective of this empirical work is to determine whether environmental clauses and criteria have an impact on SME participation in award procedures. This paper assesses for the first time the compatibility between SME accessibility and environmental issues in public procurement with a dataset encompassing approximately 10,000 award procedures in France between 2022 and 2023. The findings indicate that green public procurement stimulates SME participation. The intensity of this effect may vary between environmental clauses and criteria across sectors, but there is no evidence of a deterrent effect of green public procurement on SMEs.

We examine immigrant self-employment in Sweden during the turbulent decade 2011–2021. This is done for different cohorts of immigrants from Africa and Asia and for unincorporated and incorporated firms. Immigrants have lower business earnings and higher exit rates from self-employment than natives, which is in line with previous research. The period in which the immigrants arrived in Sweden and the type of business they are engaged in have important implications for outcomes. In most cases, outcomes are more favorable for those who came to Sweden up to the turn of the millennium, and less so for the latest arrivals. Even so, a closer look at outcomes by organizational form reveals that immigrants who arrived during 2011–2021 suffered less in terms of lower business earnings compared to earlier cohorts if they were in incorporated instead of unincorporated self-employment. Switching organizational form is not associated with catching up on business earnings for immigrant self-employed vis-à-vis Swedish-born.

Entrepreneurial Ecosystems (EEs) are embedded in a global network of resource exchange relationships. To explain how EEs develop, one must consider the dynamics of resource exchanges. To do this, we combine a social capital perspective with the concept of strategic action fields in an abductive study of six cases of EEs. We find three dynamics of resource exchange, each drawing on a specific type of social capital and fostering either optimization or innovation of EEs’ offer to entrepreneurs. These findings contribute to the EE field by highlighting the relevance of inter-EE resource exchanges for developing competitive EEs. EE practitioners find that strategically managing the exchange of resources across the boundaries of their ecosystem is vital to balancing optimization of the established offer and innovating for enriched offers to entrepreneurs in their location.

Entrepreneurial ecosystems (EEs) literature has typically focused on the internal dynamics between actors and factors within specific territories, ignoring potential exogenous linkages. This paper examines the potential interconnections between EEs using corporate accelerators (CAs) as focus. CAs are prominent actors connecting startups to large firms, investors, universities, and governments in regional EEs. Although CAs are often set up in multiple locations, their potential role in creating linkages between distant EEs has yet to be investigated. This study adopts an exploratory qualitative approach based on 43 semi-structured interviews and abundant archival data from three prominent CAs headquartered in Europe, with locations in various EEs around the world. This study uncovers three main drivers (internationalization of startups, expansion of the sourcing space, and exchange of best practices), together with five key mechanisms CAs use for fostering global linkages between EEs. In addition, adopting a theory-building perspective, this research offers several propositions to advance scholars’ understanding of EEs’ exogenous linkages formation and the relationship between motives, mechanisms, and spatial distribution. The findings highlight the role of multinational enterprises, through their CAs, in supporting EE development.

While there is ample evidence on the role of education and employment in entrepreneurship more generally, we know less about how the accumulation of specific educational paths and work experience before or during university education contributes to entrepreneurship. Using unique data from two combined surveys linking information on the population of University of Toronto graduates, we provide an analysis on how the sequence of educational paths (STEM and non-STEM; non-STEM and STEM) and work experience before and during university studies influence entrepreneurial activities. The results suggest that diverse educational backgrounds are positively correlated with both entrepreneurial propensity and number of firms established. Full-time employment experience before the completion of the final degree, while not significant for entrepreneurship, is found to play an indirect role. Our findings have implications for understanding the importance of distinctive combinations of education paths and employment in shaping university students’ entrepreneurial activity after their graduation.

Although the concept of entrepreneurial ecosystems (EE) is inherently spatial, the actual spatiality of these productive structures has been largely assumed rather than defined based on its formative processes. The oversimplification of the spatiality of EE seems to be a function of empirical reliance on available data, a situation that has generated broadly accepted definitions that delineate EE as fixed territories (be they cities, regions or even countries). Although important insights have been derived from such approaches, this has also hampered a fine-grained scrutiny on the fluidity of EE spatiality—especially along the course of EE evolutionary trajectories. Although most of its components are tied to regional territories, EE are not isolated spatial systems with no outside connections. Accordingly, addressing entrepreneurial ecosystems as such can cause an inadequate comprehension of how entrepreneurship-oriented relationships are organized between EE or between EE and the “hinterland.” These are the motivations that led us to come up with the Special Issue “Exogenous linkages of and between entrepreneurial ecosystems: Perspectives from Interregional and Global connectedness.” In this editorial, we present the articles included in this Special Issue and propose the idea of EE as “spatially-fluid” structures which affect the dynamics of EE configurations and, ultimately, their respective evolutionary trajectories.

Recent research has focused on the employee’s perspective in experiencing Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies. The purpose of this work is to empirically investigate the drivers of employees’ long-lasting working relationships when CSR strategies are in place. A sample of 441 employees across 21 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) spanning various industries in Italy is surveyed to collect data on CSR-related experiences. Then, dimensionality reduction techniques and nonlinear models are applied to self-reported data. The empirical analysis reveals the following: (i) at the individual level, intrinsic CSR initiatives are of major importance; (ii) at the organizational level, sudden changes in perceived leadership hit negatively, especially during crises; and (iii) at the intermediate level, promoting happiness at work (HAW) enhances CSR strategies, creating favorable conditions even for dissatisfied workers. Therefore, the investigation enriches the CSR micro-foundation literature by examining the role of multifaceted layers in implementing CSR strategies in SMEs. In turn, this brings important implications for managers dealing with the phenomenon of the “great resignation.”

There is increasing interest in the impact of advanced digital technologies on SMEs, but the determinants of their adoption and their association with multiple innovation outcomes remain unexplored. Based on the Flash Eurobarometer 486, this paper analyses how the adoption of artificial intelligence and robots is related to European SMEs carrying out product, process, organizational and marketing innovations. Our results establish scale-ups and start-ups as the most likely adopters of these technologies and the most innovative firms. Furthermore, internal characteristics, such as internationalization and firm size, and external factors, such as the availability of digital skills and infrastructure, are significant drivers of digitalization at the firm level. In a two-stage approach, we find that the adoption of artificial intelligence and robots is associated with all innovation types, although these technologies serve more specialised objectives in manufacturing rather than in service sectors. Our results confirm a significant variability in the adoption of artificial intelligence and robots, as well as heterogeneous associations with innovation outcomes.