Knowledge and entrepreneurial employees: a country-level analysis
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Knowledge and entrepreneurial employees: a country-level analysis Erik Stam
Accepted: 15 September 2013 / Published online: 15 October 2013 Ó Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013
Abstract According to the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship, knowledge created endogenously results in knowledge spillovers, which allow independent entrepreneurs to identify and exploit opportunities (Acs et al. in Small Bus Econ 32(1):15–30, 2009). The knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship ignores entrepreneurial activities of employees within established organizations. This ignorance is largely empirical, because there has been no large-scale study on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurial employee activities. This article presents the outcomes of the first large-scale international study of entrepreneurial employee activities. In multiple advanced capitalist economies, entrepreneurial employee activity is more prevalent than independent entrepreneurial activity. Innovation indicators are positively correlated with the prevalence of entrepreneurial employee activities, but are not or even negatively correlated with the prevalence of independent entrepreneurial activities. Keywords Entrepreneurial employees Knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship Independent entrepreneurship Innovation GEM
E. Stam (&) Utrecht University School of Economics, Kriekenpitplein 21-22, P.O. Box 80125, 3508 TC Utrecht, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]
JEL Classifications O43 O57
J83 L26 M13 O31
1 Introduction Where do entrepreneurial opportunities come from and in which organizational setting are they recognized and pursued? Investments in knowledge are seen as a key source of entrepreneurial opportunities. This has been studied on the individual level (Shane 2000), the firm level (Cohen and Levinthal 1989), the regional level (Audretsch and Lehmann 2005), and the national level (Acs et al. 2009; Braunerhjelm et al. 2010). Most entrepreneurship studies on innovation emphasize the role of new firms and independent entrepreneurs (Shane 2000; Shane and Stuart 2002; Hellmann 2007; Stam and Wennberg 2009; Qian and Acs 2013). This is largely the legacy of Schumpeter (1934; also known as Schumpeter Mark I) in which the independent entrepreneur as innovator turns new ideas into commercial products. In recent theorizing on knowledge spillovers and entrepreneurship (Audretsch et al. 2006; Audretsch and Keilbach 2007; Acs et al. 2009; Braunerhjelm et al. 2010), the role of the (independent) entrepreneur is to commercialize the new ideas that are developed in established organizations, but exploited in newly created independent firms. The Schumpeter Mark I legacy and the knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship ignore
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entrepreneurial activities of employees within established organizations. This ignorance has two roots. The first one is empirical, because there has been no large-scale study on the prevalence and nature of entrepreneurial employee activities. There have been many studies
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